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A 400-year-old dead Englishman inspires random thoughts on today’s Dallas Cowboys.
Today’s inspiration for an article about the Dallas Cowboys comes from an English gentleman who passed on about 400 years before he could see his dream of writing for Blogging The Boys come true, Mr. William Shakespeare. While the Bard might have never graced these pages, his quotations apply to some random thoughts about the current state of the Dallas Cowboys.
There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.
Gavin Escobar has been an enigma for the Cowboys faithful. The team selected “Pablo” with their second-round pick in the 2013 draft. The choice was questioned at the time, but the front office justified the selection by stating that the tight end was going to provide an added wrinkle for an offense that was having some difficulty converting inside the redzone. He was sold to the fanbase as a touchdown machine who would shine in that situation.
Escobar is also reported to have the best set of hands among all the Dallas receivers and backs.
Why then do we not see more of #89 on gameday? Escobar is clearly not at the top of the Cowboys pecking order with Jason Witten on the roster, but if the team feels as strongly as they do about the player, it would be normal to see him have a larger role in the offense. Without being able to see his talents on display there is little that fans can do other than to make the assumption that Escobar is not the player we were led to believe that he would be, yet the storyline from the front office continues to be positive and it is clear that Gavin is doing something right to maintain his position on the roster.
It would be nice to simply see the guy play and be able to judge for myself rather than form an opinion based on hearsay and nothing more.
The course of true love never did run smooth.
Cowboys fans have always had a love/hate relationship with the team, or at least those associated with the franchise. This goes all the way back to Tom Landry. It may be hard to fathom for younger generations, but there was a time when the common wisdom in North Texas was that Clint Murchison needed to run Landry out of town on a rail and find a head coach with a proven track record to build his franchise. Once things got on track with the organization and Coach Landry had established a record for consecutive playoff appearances that view changed dramatically.
Jerry Jones and Tony Romo have experienced the same thing. Jones drew the well deserved ire of the fanbase when he fired Landry. That set the tone for his relationship with the public, but when the team was winning three Lombardi Trophies in four seasons many of Jones critics faded briefly into the woodwork only to re-emerge during the dearth of championships that followed. Romo, when he did Romodini things, is viewed as the nucleus of his club, yet if Tony throws an interception he is immediately vilified.
The common core is that when the Cowboys are winning, all runs smooth, but all it takes is a down performance or two and suddenly we turn into Chicken Little, with the ‘sky is falling’ mantra.
We know what we are, but know not what we may be.
Shakespeare could have had Jason Garrett in mind when he wrote this phrase. Rarely do we see a leader in any organization express more faith in his subordinates than what we see with the Dallas head coach. Garrett believes in his people, and as a result, they believe in him.
Mired in the doldrums of consecutive 8-8 seasons, there was speculation from the outside that Coach Garrett was in serious jeopardy of losing his job. You would never know it from the reactions of the Cowboys locker room and front office. Everyone in Dallas was fully bought in to Garrett’s conviction that the franchise was facing a future without limits. In the wake of a slow start, naysayers are now beginning to see the possibilities that the Cowboys head coach recognized from the beginning of his tenure.
Hell is empty and all the devils are here.
What a perfect way to sum up the NFC East, huh? There is no love lost between the Cowboys and the other three teams that make up the division. It has been that way since the very beginning. The old heads among the faithful remember just how hard that owner in Washington tried to keep an NFL franchise out of Dallas, and the rivalry that escalated when the Cowboys managed to ‘steal’ the Commanders quarterback to jumpstart the franchise. Then there are the Eagles; need I say more? As for the Giants, I can tolerate them in small doses, especially when they take out the hooded one from New England in the Super Bowl.
What is past is prologue.
The 0-11-1 record in 1960 was certainly a bleak beginning for the franchise, but it set a baseline for a franchise that has won five Super Bowls to date. The 1-15 season that marked the beginning of the Jerry Jones era likewise was the starting point of a climb that culminated with three championships in a four year period. The current squad need to look no further back than 2015, with its 4-12 finish, to find the prologue to the next great era of Cowboys football. It is tie to set back and enjoy, folks. The show is about to begin.
All the world is indeed a stage.
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