jday
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The Problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude about the problem…savvy?
~ Jack Sparrow ~
One of my all-time favorite quotes, I think people tend to miss the significance of that truth. It is profound, really….life-changing, even. Take all your problems and write them down. Then, ask yourself the question:
Is that really a problem…or is it the way I’m looking at it that makes it a problem? Should I instead be seeing an opportunity, be it to self-improve or to simply move on?
But what if your problem is Dallas Cowboys fandom related? What if you are Pro-player/coach/front office and your problem is all those knuckleheads who believe differently?
Then your problem really is a problem.
Why?
Because there is nothing you can do to change the mind of people who have decided to think the opposite. Nothing. You can try sharing stats, but please know the other side of this conversation has just as many stats to support their belief too, and stats only prove what you allow them to prove; if they don’t fit the narrative, most disregard them. You can post video’s that provide visual aid, but, alas, all to no avail; they, too, have their videos complete with visual evidence to prove otherwise, as well. And failing that, they will instead attack the validity of said stats/visual evidence you provide, if not your overall intellect to dismiss your arguments. There is absolute no winning in these blog-battles.
People will believe whatever they want to believe…and when emotions get involved, they are usually wrong anyway…which is another important truth to grab ahold of and never let go…especially if you are married. Remember that and one day you will thank me.
It all really boils down to one question: Why do we care so much what other people believe? What other people believe is the combined result of culture, environment, and experience…it’s personal and adheres to a unique formula for each individual on this planet. But if others believe differently, we arrogantly assume they are ignorant when in fact acting like you know better on a topic that truly is unknowable is the height of idiocy, religion perhaps being the principal example of that particular phenomenon.
So here’s the problem, as it pertains to the Cowboys and that capsized half-submerged ship that was the 2017 NFL season. It is actually everybody’s fault; from the ball boy all the way up to Mr (Nothing can stop him, he’s) All the Way Up himself, Jerry Jones. The real question is, who is more at fault? And the answer to that question you will find, my friends, is a needle in a stack of needles.
For every play where Dak threw a duck of a pass to no one in particular, there is equally compelling evidence that suggest he is one of the more accurate passers in the league. I’ve seen both types of passes leave Dak’s hand. I didn’t keep count. Nor do I have the requisite motivation to go back and check. And if you decide to check yourself, remember that sometimes to avoid a sack, throwing the ball away is a good decision and should not be considered an errant pass, but moreso a smart live-to-win-another-play judgement call that great QB’s utilize on every Sunday.
For every route Dez runs where he does get separation, there are likely close to an equal amount of routes he has ran where it looks like the Corner is the Dummy and Dez is the Ventriloquist, which is another stat I’m not keeping track of…especially if you factor in all those routes he ran where the ball did not come his way.
Garrett and his infamous scheme certainly deserves blame. But that scheme earned the Cowboys a 13 & 3 record in 2016 and since 2010, he has had a top 10 offense 4 times, and came close to 5 in 2011, ranking 11th. So, while I completely understand the complaint and from time to time parrot some of those gripes myself, he still is, more often than not, doing better than 2/3rd’s of the league, which is noteworthy, if still not good enough for the Cowboys adoring fans.
Rather it is a symptom of Garrett’s scheme or ineptitude on Linehan’s part, the world may never know, but the Cowboys have been offensively predictable over the years. If you were to ask me to assess the value of Linehan based on how he has coached here, I’d say he is not innovative enough and doesn’t know how to get the most out of his players. But the problem is when he became our new OC I did a little research on him and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the man is absolutely capable of outside the box thinking as it pertains to how NFL teams use offenses and the various players that make those scheme’s work. In fact, were it not for Linehan, you probably would have never heard from Reggie Bush again after he left the Saints; Linehan’s use of Bush for a moment invigorated his otherwise failing career, and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that he can get the most of players even using unconventional approaches.
Jerry is Jerry. Of all the problems this franchise has had since he took over, he has ultimately been the common denominator; no escaping that judgement. Rather you agree with his methods or you don’t in the scheme of things it really doesn’t matter. It’s his team. He can do with it whatever he wants. If you choose to follow his team, you do so at the expense of having no control over its direction. So if you are going to choose his team to follow and accept those conditions, there really is only one question you can ask: Does he really want to win or is he in this just for the money? And the answer is absolutely he wants to win. His motivation behind why he wants to win I’m sure are numerous (including padding his already illustrious wealth), but he does want his team to win and nothing short of winning a Championship again before he leaves this earth will do.
Then you factor in an offensive line that lost two pieces a year ago (Free to retirement / Leary to Free Agency)….miscellaneous injuries that occurred to key positions (Tyron Smith, Sean Lee, etc)…Zeke’s suspension and the media circus that attracted…ball bounces that just didn’t go our way…and my growing suspicion that God might be mad at Cowboys nation for impeding his once treasured view of his favorite team with a Jumbotron and you are left with what we see transpiring every day here in the blogosphere: A world run amuck with snarky comments, insults levied at peoples intelligence and people stomping up in down the internet, king konging their chest screaming far-reaching platitudes that suggest, “As long as (insert player/coach/fo member here) is with the Cowboys, they will never win a Championship!!!”
Since I’ve rode these blog-waves for quite some time, I’m personally for the most part done arguing with people. Oh, I’ll clown people for my own personal entertainment, feigning conviction about the many abovementioned paradoxes and discuss at length what I think from time to time. But that’s not the same thing. You see, I’ve found a new way to enjoy my blogging experience. Rather than dive into the never-ending hamster wheel that is the various and notorious arguments of the blogosphere, I find it far more entertaining to instigate the arguments and watch it take on a life of its own with little to no tending-to required of me. All I really have to do is wait until the topic at hand starts crawling down the fan page and just when it’s about to jump to page 2, I throw in another incendiary comment and like a dying fire subjected to a poke or two, the topic sets ablaze again and provides hours and hours of what has become a guilty pleasure for yours truly.
What I have realized is that in these epic bouts of Pro-player/coach/front office VS Anti-player/coach/front office is rarely if ever do you see anyone concede defeat or change their beliefs accordingly….so, why then do we bother?
Beyond reading and writing, I am also a grill-enthusiast. I have quite the culinary setup in my backyard, resting underneath my covered-but-open back porch. Whilst grilling, from time to time, I’ll observe my canine BFF run back and forth, growling and barking at the dog who lives behind us. Back and forth they go as though eventually they will find the end of the wall and the likely end to my best friends life; I have a mutt and my neighbor has a pit bull; I operate under no pride-induced illusions in regards to my dogs ability to hold his own in that fight.
Anywho, in many respects, that’s a pretty good everyday life microcosm of what transpires in the blog world. At this point, your opinion about the player, the coach, the FO or the draft prospect has most likely solidified and will not change until their play on the field or the results of their decision making suggest you should believe otherwise. But being the war-centric creatures that we are, we just can’t help but fight the unwinnable fight. Because winning really isn’t about who is right, but who changes their mind first, right or wrong. And if no one changes their mind (which is the norm here), nobody win’s, regardless of who made who look like an idiot; which I suspect is the ulterior motive of many here.
In hindsight, it is an unavoidable evolution all bloggers eventually undergo; that moment where you ask yourself if you really should care what your fellow bloggers believe/think? My own answer to that question is probably fairly evident at this point and a big reason you see lapses in my contributions here. Because that question for me bleeds into another question: What would I rather be doing right now? As a general rule, at work I have two options: read or write?
As you may have guessed, I love to read…clearly I owe me penchant for writing to that favorite pastime. And so, as I try to figure out different ways to fill up my day between work-related activities that demand my attention, the decision I tend to lean toward is reading. Be it Cowboys related or some assorted fiction, my preference as a general rule, is to sit back and take a mental-vacation exploring some other characters infinitely-worse-than-my-first-world-problems problem.
But from time to time, I will experience a sort of mental jet-lag to those stationary vacations and have to instead unburden my mind or take a mental dump, if you prefer, which results in what you are reading now or the aforementioned activity of what I will going-forward affectionately refer to as war-baiting.
If you have noticed that this contribution has gone on and on longer than what was necessary, there is a reason for that: I purposefully have made this long as a sort of profiling tactic. I suspect the people that this applies to won’t take the requisite time necessary for reading this far and my ultimate hope is they don’t catch on to this new hobby of mine:
Yesterday I dropped Why Dak is the most accurate. NFL Network. In it was a video where some NFL Network nerd claimed Dak was the most accurate QB in the league based on the amount of separation from the defensive back his receivers have when his pass arrives. I’m guessing here, though I don’t know for sure, that these guys went through every pass that was completed by every QB in the NFL and measured the distance from the receiver to the individual responsible for covering him and ultimately decided what QB had to throw in the most tight windows in 2017 and further assumed that by that fact, that made them more accurate than their peers. For those of you who have already put together how ridiculously illogical that assertion is, you may unburden that deep and pronounced eye-roll here.
Whether this is a viable way to determine a QB’s accuracy is irrelevant. But for those of you who truly want me opinion on that, I’ll simply say no, it’s not really because separation, in my opinion, has more to do with both the receiver and the scheme being employed by the offense. A few posters noted that the failing of the list compiled is that it excluded the top-tier QB’s Tom Brady, Aaron Rogers, and Drew Brees, who are considered to be among the most accurate QB’s not just in the league currently but in the history of the NFL.
That is certainly a fair criticism, but the QB’s in question also benefit from offensive schemes that help manufacture separation. The Cowboys scheme is seemingly predicated on receivers winning their personal battles, where playaction or double-moves fails to create separation for them…which is most of the time if Zeke is not on the field and a big reason the Cowboys struggled during his suspension last year.
The important take-away is that as I was having my morning coffee yesterday morning and happened upon this recommended video on my Youtube wall the first thought that entered my deviant mind was: “This is going to make a bunch of people’s head explode!” As quickly as I could I chose a title that was sure to catch eyes, dropped the video without any further commentary and watched as it took on a life of its own…my own little blogworld Frankenstein and I’m happy to report 13 pages later it is still going strong. Hours and hours of metaphorical dog’s running back and forth along the back fence getting absolutely nowhere.
Again, the trick to it, if you’re interested in this social-networking-experiment is to wait until it starts to lose steam, select a poster you determine is the most emotionally invested in their belief, and hit him or her with a response that is sure to illicit an emotional response. If they have strong feelings, make no mistake, they will respond and send the topic right back to the top of the fan page. The more bloggers that enter the fray, the less you have to babysit the thread as it grows.
For that post, I was unfortunately benched due to a cuss word appearing in one of the videos I posted to catch that emotional response I was looking for, but fortunately that did not matter. By that point, the topic was a full-on forest fire…and that fire continued to burn until around 1:20 this afternoon, which was when the last post as of right now was made.
In closing and in essence, at one time my problem with the blogging experience was my own inability to change the minds of my readership, despite the logic and facts I employed to prove my point. The ugly truth is you either came into my contribution already thinking accordingly or you didn’t. And if you didn’t agree with my way of thinking, that did not change over the course of your read. It was infuriating. But then I realized my problem was not the problem….
Thoughts?
~ Jack Sparrow ~
One of my all-time favorite quotes, I think people tend to miss the significance of that truth. It is profound, really….life-changing, even. Take all your problems and write them down. Then, ask yourself the question:
Is that really a problem…or is it the way I’m looking at it that makes it a problem? Should I instead be seeing an opportunity, be it to self-improve or to simply move on?
But what if your problem is Dallas Cowboys fandom related? What if you are Pro-player/coach/front office and your problem is all those knuckleheads who believe differently?
Then your problem really is a problem.
Why?
Because there is nothing you can do to change the mind of people who have decided to think the opposite. Nothing. You can try sharing stats, but please know the other side of this conversation has just as many stats to support their belief too, and stats only prove what you allow them to prove; if they don’t fit the narrative, most disregard them. You can post video’s that provide visual aid, but, alas, all to no avail; they, too, have their videos complete with visual evidence to prove otherwise, as well. And failing that, they will instead attack the validity of said stats/visual evidence you provide, if not your overall intellect to dismiss your arguments. There is absolute no winning in these blog-battles.
People will believe whatever they want to believe…and when emotions get involved, they are usually wrong anyway…which is another important truth to grab ahold of and never let go…especially if you are married. Remember that and one day you will thank me.
It all really boils down to one question: Why do we care so much what other people believe? What other people believe is the combined result of culture, environment, and experience…it’s personal and adheres to a unique formula for each individual on this planet. But if others believe differently, we arrogantly assume they are ignorant when in fact acting like you know better on a topic that truly is unknowable is the height of idiocy, religion perhaps being the principal example of that particular phenomenon.
So here’s the problem, as it pertains to the Cowboys and that capsized half-submerged ship that was the 2017 NFL season. It is actually everybody’s fault; from the ball boy all the way up to Mr (Nothing can stop him, he’s) All the Way Up himself, Jerry Jones. The real question is, who is more at fault? And the answer to that question you will find, my friends, is a needle in a stack of needles.
For every play where Dak threw a duck of a pass to no one in particular, there is equally compelling evidence that suggest he is one of the more accurate passers in the league. I’ve seen both types of passes leave Dak’s hand. I didn’t keep count. Nor do I have the requisite motivation to go back and check. And if you decide to check yourself, remember that sometimes to avoid a sack, throwing the ball away is a good decision and should not be considered an errant pass, but moreso a smart live-to-win-another-play judgement call that great QB’s utilize on every Sunday.
For every route Dez runs where he does get separation, there are likely close to an equal amount of routes he has ran where it looks like the Corner is the Dummy and Dez is the Ventriloquist, which is another stat I’m not keeping track of…especially if you factor in all those routes he ran where the ball did not come his way.
Garrett and his infamous scheme certainly deserves blame. But that scheme earned the Cowboys a 13 & 3 record in 2016 and since 2010, he has had a top 10 offense 4 times, and came close to 5 in 2011, ranking 11th. So, while I completely understand the complaint and from time to time parrot some of those gripes myself, he still is, more often than not, doing better than 2/3rd’s of the league, which is noteworthy, if still not good enough for the Cowboys adoring fans.
Rather it is a symptom of Garrett’s scheme or ineptitude on Linehan’s part, the world may never know, but the Cowboys have been offensively predictable over the years. If you were to ask me to assess the value of Linehan based on how he has coached here, I’d say he is not innovative enough and doesn’t know how to get the most out of his players. But the problem is when he became our new OC I did a little research on him and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the man is absolutely capable of outside the box thinking as it pertains to how NFL teams use offenses and the various players that make those scheme’s work. In fact, were it not for Linehan, you probably would have never heard from Reggie Bush again after he left the Saints; Linehan’s use of Bush for a moment invigorated his otherwise failing career, and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that he can get the most of players even using unconventional approaches.
Jerry is Jerry. Of all the problems this franchise has had since he took over, he has ultimately been the common denominator; no escaping that judgement. Rather you agree with his methods or you don’t in the scheme of things it really doesn’t matter. It’s his team. He can do with it whatever he wants. If you choose to follow his team, you do so at the expense of having no control over its direction. So if you are going to choose his team to follow and accept those conditions, there really is only one question you can ask: Does he really want to win or is he in this just for the money? And the answer is absolutely he wants to win. His motivation behind why he wants to win I’m sure are numerous (including padding his already illustrious wealth), but he does want his team to win and nothing short of winning a Championship again before he leaves this earth will do.
Then you factor in an offensive line that lost two pieces a year ago (Free to retirement / Leary to Free Agency)….miscellaneous injuries that occurred to key positions (Tyron Smith, Sean Lee, etc)…Zeke’s suspension and the media circus that attracted…ball bounces that just didn’t go our way…and my growing suspicion that God might be mad at Cowboys nation for impeding his once treasured view of his favorite team with a Jumbotron and you are left with what we see transpiring every day here in the blogosphere: A world run amuck with snarky comments, insults levied at peoples intelligence and people stomping up in down the internet, king konging their chest screaming far-reaching platitudes that suggest, “As long as (insert player/coach/fo member here) is with the Cowboys, they will never win a Championship!!!”
Since I’ve rode these blog-waves for quite some time, I’m personally for the most part done arguing with people. Oh, I’ll clown people for my own personal entertainment, feigning conviction about the many abovementioned paradoxes and discuss at length what I think from time to time. But that’s not the same thing. You see, I’ve found a new way to enjoy my blogging experience. Rather than dive into the never-ending hamster wheel that is the various and notorious arguments of the blogosphere, I find it far more entertaining to instigate the arguments and watch it take on a life of its own with little to no tending-to required of me. All I really have to do is wait until the topic at hand starts crawling down the fan page and just when it’s about to jump to page 2, I throw in another incendiary comment and like a dying fire subjected to a poke or two, the topic sets ablaze again and provides hours and hours of what has become a guilty pleasure for yours truly.
What I have realized is that in these epic bouts of Pro-player/coach/front office VS Anti-player/coach/front office is rarely if ever do you see anyone concede defeat or change their beliefs accordingly….so, why then do we bother?
Beyond reading and writing, I am also a grill-enthusiast. I have quite the culinary setup in my backyard, resting underneath my covered-but-open back porch. Whilst grilling, from time to time, I’ll observe my canine BFF run back and forth, growling and barking at the dog who lives behind us. Back and forth they go as though eventually they will find the end of the wall and the likely end to my best friends life; I have a mutt and my neighbor has a pit bull; I operate under no pride-induced illusions in regards to my dogs ability to hold his own in that fight.
Anywho, in many respects, that’s a pretty good everyday life microcosm of what transpires in the blog world. At this point, your opinion about the player, the coach, the FO or the draft prospect has most likely solidified and will not change until their play on the field or the results of their decision making suggest you should believe otherwise. But being the war-centric creatures that we are, we just can’t help but fight the unwinnable fight. Because winning really isn’t about who is right, but who changes their mind first, right or wrong. And if no one changes their mind (which is the norm here), nobody win’s, regardless of who made who look like an idiot; which I suspect is the ulterior motive of many here.
In hindsight, it is an unavoidable evolution all bloggers eventually undergo; that moment where you ask yourself if you really should care what your fellow bloggers believe/think? My own answer to that question is probably fairly evident at this point and a big reason you see lapses in my contributions here. Because that question for me bleeds into another question: What would I rather be doing right now? As a general rule, at work I have two options: read or write?
As you may have guessed, I love to read…clearly I owe me penchant for writing to that favorite pastime. And so, as I try to figure out different ways to fill up my day between work-related activities that demand my attention, the decision I tend to lean toward is reading. Be it Cowboys related or some assorted fiction, my preference as a general rule, is to sit back and take a mental-vacation exploring some other characters infinitely-worse-than-my-first-world-problems problem.
But from time to time, I will experience a sort of mental jet-lag to those stationary vacations and have to instead unburden my mind or take a mental dump, if you prefer, which results in what you are reading now or the aforementioned activity of what I will going-forward affectionately refer to as war-baiting.
If you have noticed that this contribution has gone on and on longer than what was necessary, there is a reason for that: I purposefully have made this long as a sort of profiling tactic. I suspect the people that this applies to won’t take the requisite time necessary for reading this far and my ultimate hope is they don’t catch on to this new hobby of mine:
Yesterday I dropped Why Dak is the most accurate. NFL Network. In it was a video where some NFL Network nerd claimed Dak was the most accurate QB in the league based on the amount of separation from the defensive back his receivers have when his pass arrives. I’m guessing here, though I don’t know for sure, that these guys went through every pass that was completed by every QB in the NFL and measured the distance from the receiver to the individual responsible for covering him and ultimately decided what QB had to throw in the most tight windows in 2017 and further assumed that by that fact, that made them more accurate than their peers. For those of you who have already put together how ridiculously illogical that assertion is, you may unburden that deep and pronounced eye-roll here.
Whether this is a viable way to determine a QB’s accuracy is irrelevant. But for those of you who truly want me opinion on that, I’ll simply say no, it’s not really because separation, in my opinion, has more to do with both the receiver and the scheme being employed by the offense. A few posters noted that the failing of the list compiled is that it excluded the top-tier QB’s Tom Brady, Aaron Rogers, and Drew Brees, who are considered to be among the most accurate QB’s not just in the league currently but in the history of the NFL.
That is certainly a fair criticism, but the QB’s in question also benefit from offensive schemes that help manufacture separation. The Cowboys scheme is seemingly predicated on receivers winning their personal battles, where playaction or double-moves fails to create separation for them…which is most of the time if Zeke is not on the field and a big reason the Cowboys struggled during his suspension last year.
The important take-away is that as I was having my morning coffee yesterday morning and happened upon this recommended video on my Youtube wall the first thought that entered my deviant mind was: “This is going to make a bunch of people’s head explode!” As quickly as I could I chose a title that was sure to catch eyes, dropped the video without any further commentary and watched as it took on a life of its own…my own little blogworld Frankenstein and I’m happy to report 13 pages later it is still going strong. Hours and hours of metaphorical dog’s running back and forth along the back fence getting absolutely nowhere.
Again, the trick to it, if you’re interested in this social-networking-experiment is to wait until it starts to lose steam, select a poster you determine is the most emotionally invested in their belief, and hit him or her with a response that is sure to illicit an emotional response. If they have strong feelings, make no mistake, they will respond and send the topic right back to the top of the fan page. The more bloggers that enter the fray, the less you have to babysit the thread as it grows.
For that post, I was unfortunately benched due to a cuss word appearing in one of the videos I posted to catch that emotional response I was looking for, but fortunately that did not matter. By that point, the topic was a full-on forest fire…and that fire continued to burn until around 1:20 this afternoon, which was when the last post as of right now was made.
In closing and in essence, at one time my problem with the blogging experience was my own inability to change the minds of my readership, despite the logic and facts I employed to prove my point. The ugly truth is you either came into my contribution already thinking accordingly or you didn’t. And if you didn’t agree with my way of thinking, that did not change over the course of your read. It was infuriating. But then I realized my problem was not the problem….
Thoughts?
Short answer to a long one 
