Good for him. He is serviceable, it was our staff that wasn’t..
I would have loved it if Jimmy or Parcells had been the HC when Taco was a rookie.
Parcells: Rookie (never calling him by name), get my drink, hurry...
Parcells always made rookie 1st round picks fetch his drinks during practice to keep them from getting a big ego.
Parcells had a way of getting into a player's head. He told Jay Ratliff "You're lucky to be on this field because everybody else has more talent than you"
Jimmy: In that red faced angry "the asthma field is over there" rage personality that scared even Michael Irvin and Charles Haley, "Taco, get your #$%^-ing arse in gear before I cut-off your head and shove it up your backside".
That would be be on a day that Jimmy was in good mood...
Jimmy day 2: "Taco, your going to practice at RB today. It's a mild 105 degrees in the shade here in Austin TX and you are the RB in middle drill. I'm going to run you through middle drill until you're literally dead but don't worry I have a Doctor here that will revive you"
Middle Drill
Jimmy's middle drill was primarily for the DL and LBs to practice stopping middle runs.
Jimmy says that Emmitt did it, but I was at training camp in 92 & 93 and Emmitt was not the RB in middle drill while I was there. Jimmy would put the backup RBs in and it was a brutal beating because the defenders would just tee-off on the RB that was not allowed to hesitate or run outside.
Blurp about Jimmy's middle drill
When Jimmy Johnson coached at the college level and for the Dallas Cowboys, he ran a similar exercise called the middle drill — an inside running drill with no receivers or defensive backs on the field and no outside runs allowed.
“My favorite drill,” Johnson says. “That’s why we ran it every single week throughout my coaching career, at every level. You can’t do that now.”
The analyst for Fox NFL Sunday thinks “that’s one reason why the tackling is so bad today.”
Even the Cowboys’ Emmitt Smith, the NFL’s all-time leading rusher, participated. “He ran it like everyone else,” Johnson says, “although I’d pull him early from it. It was more for the linemen and linebackers.”