This came in the 3rd inning of last night's game (8/26) when Jim Knox was interviewing the kid from The Blind Side. Jim had just finished speaking to the kid, who was squirmy and obviously under the effects of cotton candy overdose, when the kid's infant brother was placed into Jim's hands. The child started crying uncontrollably.

Just as they were panning out, I heard Josh say, "You really don't want to leave Jim Knox with your small children".

My wife almost fell out of her chair.

And the Mavs don't do a damn thing to actually get better. They just tread water. Yes, we had to re-sign Dirk, and I'm glad we got Haywood back (now if little Dick Carlyle actually bothers to play him), but this is still the same team that chumped out against the ancient Spurs in the 1st round. We were the 2nd seed, which was made the early exit that much more embarassing.

Someone give me hope as a Mavs fan for 2011. Please. Tell me Carlyle is getting fired and Roddy is now free to be greatness. Tell me they drafted a true badass who is going to actually amount to something.

Tell me something good.

Our offense is stacked, and it may be the best offense the Cowboys have ever had when it comes to the skill positions.

QB: Tony Romo, Tony Romo, Tony Romo. I can't imagine the season he'll have if he gets protection. Two #1 receivers, both with sure hands and blazing speed, the best TE in football, and an insane RB trio.

WR: Miles Austin, Dez Bryant, Roy Williams, Patrick Crayton, Kevin Ogletree: as good a receiving corps as there is in football

RB: Felix Jones, Tashard Choce, Marion Barber, Scott Sicko (if he can survive a potential conversion to FB and learn to block, he'll be an insane receiving weapon out of the backfield): a 1-2-3 punch no defense can keep in check. 

TE: Jason Witten, Martellus Bennett, John Phillips: maybe the best TE group in football

Seriously, can anyone name a team with better offensive weapons?

Our offensive line is suspect in some areas. I worry a bit about Marc Colombo but think we have options with the kid out of Notre Dame. Leonard Davis, Andre Gurode, & Kyle Kozier I'm not worried about. But Doug Free, despite his impressive play last season at RT, scares the hell out of me.

We may well resign Flo to a lesser contract and have open tryouts at LT, but it's a unique position in the skillset required and the importance to a right-handed quarterback. Flo has been incredibly durable, but in times he's been out our offense has crumbled. If Doug Free can step in and be 90% of Flozell (without the false-start penalties), I really think we have a chance to go to the Super Bowl. If Free buckles and the job goes to Robert Brewster (or someone not on the roster yet), we'll be an 8-8 team with an IR Pro Bowl Quarterback.I predict Free will get a lot of help with Marty B staying in to block, but he's going to be going man-up on some of the best DE's in football thanks to the Cowboys being in the NFC East.

I hope JJ knows what he's doing...

5/7/10 - Hmmmm, this is now officially my most moot fanpost ever. Thanks in part to Barbie for making it as such.

I'm not a "basketball man" and don't pretend to be. I've followed the Mavericks very closely since 1992, and watch an average of 70-75 games a year. I played in high school but not in college, but think I have a pretty good grasp from an armchair coaches perspective.

WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH RICK CARLYLE? I won't lay this all on this shoulders, but not since the days of Quinn Buckner have I seen such poor substitutions.

It took him until game 5 to realize Erick Dampier sucks and cannot guard Tim Duncan. With nothing to lose, he goes with Haywood to start game 5 and look what happens? Holy shit, Duncan is human!!

It took until game 6 for him to realize - and then quickly forget - that Roddy Beaubois is the future of this team. Beaubois comes in when the Mavs are at a historic pace for fewest points in a game and lights it up, averaging almost a point a minute. The Mavs are right back in the game to start the 4th quarter, then he F-ING SITS RODDY FOR THE 4th in favor of Jason Terry, who folds like a card table.

He'll be back next year, I'm sure, and I honestly think the Mavs will be a better team. No team, to my knowledge, has ever pulled a blockbuster midseason trade and gone the distance. Kidd will be a year older, but hopefully he'll work intimately with Roddy, prepping him to take the reins.

Shawn Marion is the biggest free agent bust in Mavericks history. He has nothing. A broken pogo stick. But we're stuck with him until he's, what, 36? Great...

Sorry for the rant, I'm just disgusted and crestfallen. The prospects of this team look good next year with Roddy, Caron, Dirk, Haywood, Terry (in a diminished role), Kidd (in a diminished role), and Berea as a 3rd point guard. But we need a shooting guard badly so Caron can play the 3 and we can keep the useless Shawn Marion on the pine as much as possible.

Without condemning or condoning Ron Washington, for the off-the-field (and in-the-nose) controversy and substitution/lineup questions that invariably come from being a major-league manager, do you feel it's time for the Rangers to make a change at manager?

I was very happy when the Rangers hired Ron on, and thought after a very tough first few months of his career he really turned things around. He's grown on the fans, and his players - at least on the surface - stand behind him.

What can you say about this season? Probably the worst.

Jerry will get to say to himself that he's still a competent football man because of a playoff win. If there would have been one positive had we lost to Philadelphia last week, it would have been Jerry relinquishing the reins to a real general manager.

The offensive line was embarrassed. They were just crushed.

We'll get a chance for Folk to come back next year, because Suisham will be working at Office Depot  next month.

Wade Phillips should be fired. I know it's a scapegoat move, but either he or Hudson Houck needs to be sacrificed for this debacle.

I don't blame Romo for a lot, but he did nothing special. Nor did anyone else on the team.

Excuse me, I need to buy some rat poison and mix it with my post-game beer.

I can't say I didn't enjoy points of the season, but there's nothing good to take from the chain of events that led us here. Miles Austin is a sure keeper, maybe The Tree will take Roy's place next year. But we're a year older, and unless we find a difference maker or two in free agency or the draft, expect a fair to good football team in the future.

Have a great off-season everyone.

Okay, I've heard your opinions, and I can't argue.

First of all, I intend for this to be an open discussion.

Quincyyyyyy's post of the all-decade team was so much fun to read I decided to torture myself and put together a list of who I feel are the worst. There were a lot of candidates in this terrible decade. (Minimum 8 starts during one season '00-'09, based on level of disappointment for the team).

Continue reading this post »

I've been called far worse than a moron by people who, unlike yourself, can actually type a complete sentence.BUT YOU CAN GO FUCK YOURSELF FOR CALLING ME A RACIST, YOU PIECE OF SHIT. I really, really hope you are currently in Puerto Rico and speak very limited English, otherwise you're fucking retarded. I'm sure I'm also a racist because I didn't vote for Obama, huh?

Ooh, you're a Kobe fan. What an amazing basketball fan that makes you. It takes a real expert to point out the best player in the league. I'd be delighted to compare knowledge of basketball with you.

So I'm a moron because I was dogging your boy JJB. Do me a favor and cry yourself to sleep on your Kobe Bryant splootie rag you keep under your pillow. Berea IS a one-dimensional player, pure and simple. He has decent feet but stubby arms and really isn't that fast. He draws charges fairly well and that's his ONLY contribution on the defensive end. He's been playing lights-out compared to when I wrote that Fanpost (if you actually had the brain power to cross reference the date I wrote it and game-to-game stats), and that's the closest I'll come to a retraction. He's a low-ceiling, one-dimensional offensive player. Beaubois has INFINITELY more potential, and I think it's a shame he's buried on the bench when he was playing pretty well for a 21 year-old rookie, but you're not interested in facts because I called a Puerto Rican out. What's funny is you're the goddamn racist here, getting your panties in a bunch because I think a black Frenchman is better than a Puerto Rican.

I'm done with you now. I hope in reading this you've doubled your vocabulary. Pour some water in your mom's dish for me and tell her I'll be over later.

To the editors and everyone else: I apologize for this - I rarely use profanities on SBNation blogs. When someone calls me a racist, however, that's something I'm willing to potentially be banned over by the tone of my reply.

Go Mavs!!

I'll admit you're right

Romo's now my hero too

I like eating crow.

Unfortunately, my beautiful, elegant poem requires 75 words to be able to FanPost it, and I'm sure a good portion of you are going to be mad I made this a FanPost.

Interesting story, since we're into wasting a little time and space, it was very cold in my condo yesterday so in a shameless instant I donned my fiance's leopard-print Snuggie. Well, the Cowboys won in decisive fashion, so by the Athletic Law of Superstition, I'm going to have to wear this butt-ugly Snuggie before every Cowboys game in the future.

Please don't judge me. Besides that, I'm all man!

In response to the many votes my braindead poll from last week, Running Back Depth Chart, received, I feel it's time for a new armchair Monday morning coaching staff poll, and this one should be even more braindead than the last one.

Great kickers are hard to find, but decent kickers are fairly common in this league. As a rookie, Nick Folk was perhaps our team's MVP. But off-season labrum surgery caused him to miss much of training camp, and he simply hasn't been the player he once was.

I have a horrible vision in my head that if the Cowboys cut Folk, he'll spend the remainder of this season and the off-season further rehabbing his hip and come back to his old form for some other team, but those are the chances you sometimes take when your kicker routinely changes the game's momentum by missing very makeable (inside 45 yards) kicks.

Buehler is a possibility, but the coaching staff said he's nowhere near consistent enough to be kicking FG's. Then again, this is the same staff that evaluated Brad Johnson as a good backup quarterback and Barbie Carpenter as our best nickle linebacker.

Knee-jerk alert!! But after Barber's game against the Giants, a little arm-chair offensive coordinating is in order. Barber hasn't been the same player since partially tearing his quad, and Felix is just starting to look like his old self again. Never mind the argument, "Why the heck are they even playing if they aren't 100%??", that's up to the coaches, who will likely be joining the 10.2% of the United States in the unemployment line should the Cowboys not win a playoff game this year.

The Cowboys face a unique problem in that all 3 of their running backs are potential starters. What would you do going into the San Diego game?

He's just an embarrassment. He's personally contributed all he can to two losses this season, and he did everything in his stumpy-armed power to lose for us against Milwaukee tonight. The only thing Beaubois has proven is the he a) isn't afraid or intimidated by the NBA game, b) has a pretty sweet little jumper, c) is a pretty good defender who's not afraid to hustle, & d) he's not only incredibly quick, but very athletic as well.

I'd rather the first half of the season be spent getting Beaubois some REAL playing time when it counts in games. I understand not trusting a 21 year old kid who played in the JV's of France last year, but he's ready.

Is the fact that two consecutive weeks now he's held onto the football while facing the pass rush, with very little time before the half expires. It hasn't bitten him yet - two weeks ago he made a miraculous escape-and-pass to Crayton and last week he threw into triple coverage, missing Witten in the back corner - but all it would take would be a sack and we'd be screwed before each half.

Besides that, he's playing lights-out. The whole team is. I love the taste of crow in the morning.

And when I'm apparently wrong about a Cowboys player, I'll happily admit it.

Mike Jenkins is playing some great football. His coverage skills have sharpened considerably, and apparently Wade did in fact send him to 6 year old pee-wee leagues over the summer so he could learn how to tackle learn how to handle contact. He had a great open field tackle of Turner (I believe) in the 4th quarter, and Turner is a much more intimidating back thank Derrick Ward ever was.

Kudos, Mike. I'll take a little salt with my crow if you don't mind.

Let's not consider last games of the season, because I'm sure there are plenty of coaches that get fired in such a fashion.

I've never been so frustrated by a win in my life. This is the NFL, where you play a 16 game season, and each win is important. It's been my motto to not let a "bad win" sink in too much, because there are close losses against superior teams that I rarely consider moral victories. Either you win in this league or you lose.

Then there was the game yesterday, against one of the worst teams in the NFL. Dallas was clearly the superior team, and should have rammed it down the Chief's throats, but they simply couldn't get out of their own way. Each mistake was a microcosm in itself, like Crayton's fumble(s), 5 off-sides calls in one series, bad routes, broken pass coverage, a phantom helmet-to-helmet personal foul (that just can't warrant a fine from the league). But add them all together, and you have a team in serious disarray. It wasn't the clueless, heartless team that put on their pads only to get pounded by the Eagles in the last game of last year's season, but it was a team that had next to no focus and showed a hideous lack of attention to detail. And detail starts with coaching and attention to detail. Plain and simple, we have a terrible head coach and an offensive coordinator that thinks he's smarter than everyone else. We play down to our competition and that's completely inexcusible.

Off-sides penalties?? In the pros? Not on a hard-count?? When does that happen??

It looks like this year is going to be another ho-hum Cowboys season, and as a life-long fan I've fooled myself time and time again to think THIS team could be the one to win it all. After all, any team can win on any given Sunday (not to give props to one of the worst movies in history), but how many times have I told myself, "This team will NEVER win anything with Jerry Jones as General Manager."? The day Jerry fired Jimmy Johnson, I told my friend, "The Cowboys will never win the Super Bowl again.". I'm glad I was wrong once. But I find that statement to be the wisest, most prognosticating statement I've probably ever made (sigh).

I love this team, I love the tradition (or what it once was), and I still love the blue star and the tradition of greatness that I grew up with as a child. But Jerry's incompetence as a GM is finally starting to emotionally divorce me from this team, and that makes me very upset. Maybe he'll finally make the call at the end of the season and step down as GM. Maybe Bill Cowher and his amazing underbite will step in and lead this team back to prominence. But after so many years of Jerry's overriding ego, I doubt it will happen.

- Lord Humungus (formerly GhostofGaryHogeboom).