That was something special about Jimmy... he could evaluate talent better than anyone. They did a rundown of his picks and soooo many of them turned out to be great to HOF players. It was amazing!
I think we've been a little better recently in talent acquisition and that is a trend that must continue. One problem is tho that Jerry won't take draft picks for his players. When is the last time we traded anyone for picks. Talking Cowboys asked this question about why we didn't try and get anything for Ware once we decided to move on. I still haven't seen a good explanation yet. Did Ware need to go? Yes but we should have at least tried to get something for him. Do people think we couldn't at least got a 2nd for him if not a 1st? I think we should have traded Ware and Rat both.... Anything is better than nothing. At least make the attempt.
I think Jimmy's specialty is that he knew how players of all backgrounds think and he knew how to use it to motivate them. Parcells was very good at this as well, but he had more of a smaller range of players that he knew what made them tick and in the end, he would usually end up with very business like players. Jimmy's scope was wider in terms of personalities he could motivate.
I will never forget when Jimmy was at the U. and they had ran up the score against Notre Dame and their players liked to celebrate and the media and even the school's Chancellor condemned the team for running up the score and celebrating the way they did. I personally have a dislike for it as well (it's disrespectful). But, you could see after the game the players were hanging their heads a bit because of the constant barrage of negativity and Jimmy says to the effect:
'Hey, we will never apologize for winning and playing Hurricane football!'
And you can see that immediately bring the player's heads and moods up.
I'm not a big fan of Jimmy. To me, wanting to leave the Cowboys for the freaking Dolphins is sacrilege to me. He was also an ingrate to Jerry as people thought Jerry was crazy for hiring him and even crazier after he kept him around after going 1-15. Jimmy also flip-flops so many times on subjects that it is hard to believe a word he says.
But, he was a great coach because he understood how important the mental part of football was and how to use that with so many different personalities. And that's where the 'right kind of guy' theory can fail. It's hard to compile those 100% self-motivated types. More often than not you may be lucky to get a dozen of those types while the others are self motivated maybe 50% of the time. If you don't have the coach that help get those players that are not always 100% motivated, then you're just chasing a false ideology and the team will fail.
YR
