News: BTB: Hate To Say I Told You So, Jerry Jones

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What are the biggest questions the Cowboys have failed to address so far this offseason?

Captain Hindsight and his powerful sidekicks Shoulda, Coulda and Woulda are a fearsome team. They pop up unannounced all over sports media and even in places like Blogging The Boys, and use their amazing powers of extraordinary hindsight to point out the glaringly obvious with great smugness and self-satisfaction, but always after the fact.

• Dallas could have drafted Randy Moss
• "This is not rocket science," acclaimed rocket scientist Dr. Stephen A. Smith proclaimed with hindsight so strong it can see through walls: Russell Wilson should not have thrown that fateful slant route which ultimately cost the Seahawks Super Bowl XLIX.
• Janet Jackson should have gone for buttons over velcro at the Super Bowl XXXVIII.

Sports media is filled with writers and broadcasters who think they know all there is to know, and post hoc ergo propter hoc they therefore know everything better than the team they are covering.

But the reality is that almost all of the time, the sports media (and we here at BTB are part of that sports media) is making semi-educated guesses at best. Throw enough of those guesses against the wall and eventually a few will stick.

But it's not just the sports media. Nobody is immune from taking an obscure comment from a long-ago thread and holding it up years later as proof that you are the football equivalent of Nostradamus. I have done it, you have done it, everybody else has done it too.

So today we turn this thing around. Instead waiting until after the season to point out what the Cowboys should have done, we look at a few topics that have dominated recent Cowboys headlines which would make for a good "Hate to Say I Told You So" letter to Jerry Jones after the season.

The Backup QB situation

The Cowboys’ No. 1 off-season priority was to find a backup QB they could win a few games with, should Tony Romo get injured. They settled on Kellen Moore and added Dak Prescott in the fourth round of the draft. If this one goes wrong, the Cowboys have nobody to blame but themselves.

Where will the pressure come from?

Our own Joey Ickes recently pointed out the lack of experience on the defensive line:

Ladies and gentlemen, there are fewer than 10 NFL QB sacks separating me and the Cowboys active sack leader, who happens to play CB...

— Joey Ickes (@JoeyIckes) July 27, 2016​

If the situation works out in the Cowboys' favor, and the team gets enough sacks, then the front office will look like geniuses. If not, they had better get ready for a lot of smug I-told-you-so's.

Will the investment of the fourth-overall pick in a running back pay off?

The Cowboys could have drafted two healthy defenders with their first two picks, and both would likely have been starters and immediate upgrades for a struggling defense. But they didn't. The 2016 offense had better put up 30+ points on average, keep the defense off the field, and win games all on its own. Or else.

All sorts of things might happen this year that could derail the Cowboys' season. The Cowboys can't prepare for every conceivable contingency, but there are topics (like the three above) that even Stephen A. Smith could have seen coming.

"Hate to Say I Told You So" is the first single from Swedish rock band The Hives. Today, you can take The Hives at their word and tell Jerry Jones what you think of his GM'ing this offseason, and what contingency he should have addressed.

I'll trust that the replies we get rise above the "Jerry sucks"-level of moronic discourse common among people as bright as Alaska in December.

And once the season is over, we'll come back and revisit our collective predictions, fears, and worries, to see which were warranted and which had us collectively hyperventilating for no reason at all.

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