Well, the Dallas Cowboys have done it to me again! I haven’t been right about them in what – twenty or thirty years. I’m to the point of a lot of the fans right now that are ready to give up. They convinced me that they had the best quarterback in the league. They had the best receiver in the league. They had the best defensive player in the league and they’re going to win the whole thing! They get beat in the first round! What now?
For a few days I thought, “Fire the coach” and they rehire him. I had all these other little coaching things you ought to do and make the team right. I couldn’t find anything that looks like it would work. So I decided to go back in history. Maybe one of these guys they should have stuck with. How about Dave Campo? I don’t think there’s an outpouring for him – Chan Gailey, Wade Phillips, Bill Parcells, Mike McCarthy – is he as good as any of them? I guess. I don’t know. There’s Barry Switzer. There’s Jason Garrett. There’s Jimmy Johnson and Tom Landry. That’s it! There are only nine coaches in the Cowboy history. McCarthy, except I guess for Landry and maybe Johnson, probably has a better resume than anybody else. Why not McCarthy? He’s been there for four years. Every year the last three he’s won twelve ballgames. Why not McCarthy? I kept thinking of other teams, not just coaches, but teams and do the Cowboys have anything in common with all of them. I thought about all of the Super Bowl teams and I just couldn’t find that common denominator. Nothing that just tied them to great success. So they’ve had nine coaches – I’ll be honest with you I don’t think all of the nine were great for them – but they’ve had some good coaches and the two best, Landry and Johnson, both had Super Bowls, multiple Super Bowls.
So, I got to thinking. As long as I kept up with them that long, surely I could think of something. I married my wife and she was such a big Cowboy fan and then she became a non-Cowboy fan because she didn’t like the guy who owned them, Jerry Jones.
She swore off them and she was serious about that because Tom Landry was gone. I went way past all of that. I went way, way back and here’s the thing that kept jumping out at me. I’ll be honest with you, I don’t want to research this and go back that far but here is what I know. It was either the late 60’s, maybe 1970, the Cowboys were playing in the Cotton Bowl and friends and I would go up there quite often and watch them play. Then I remembered it. A game one August up there and it was a preseason game – a preseason game. They played the St Louis Cardinals and they got beat 38-0. My dear friend, former Voice of the Lions Ken Schulze, told me after that ballgame, “Dallas, we are either going to have a great season or we will implode because you can’t play any worse than that.” They got a lot better.
That year they either won the Super Bowl or they played in the Super Bowl. Anyway, they were Super Bowl quality with a bad start.
So, we had a horrible ending to this season. Tie on to it and prove you’re a real good team and use that loss to become the kind of team you really want to be.
Until next time, so long everybody.
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‘Out of the Box’ with Dallas Huston is published each Monday morning at BrownwoodNews.com. Dallas was the radio voice of the Brownwood Lions and Howard Payne Yellow Jackets for more than 55 years. He currently is Pastor of Center City Baptist Church and hosts a Men’s Bible Study in Brownwood on Monday evenings. Your comments are welcome at [email protected].