FanShot

Can't the Cowboys just be pretty good?

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Interesting article on BSPN Dallas. A more optimistic outlook. =============== I love the folks who cover the Dallas Cowboys, because they're all so grouchy about the team. The Cowboys beat remains one of the last great bastions of skepticism in modern sports journalism. You talk to the people who spend their days around the team and you would think there wasn't one decent player on the roster except maybe DeMarcus Ware, and he needs to speak up more. I think it's the way teams should be covered -- relentless doubt and constant questioning of everything the newsmakers are saying. I've long believed that the beat writers who cover a team, since they examine it so closely every day and see all of the warts and flaws, should be the last ones to admit the team is any good. .....It's easy to look at the team you see every day and get caught up in the flaws, but every team has flaws. Six teams will make the playoffs from the NFC, and they won't all be great. Some of them will just be pretty good. Heck, last year, one was downright lousy, and it knocked off the defending champs in the first round. This isn't a league in which a handful of teams contend and the rest don't. This is a league with ample middle ground from which some teams rise to great heights and others tumble. It happens every year, and we never know which teams will rise from the middle and which will fall. The Cowboys can be wisely future-focused and at the same time contend in 2011. These things are not mutually exclusive. It doesn't all have to be one extreme or the other -- not even with the Cowboys. I don't think they'll win their division and coast into the playoffs without a care, but I think they have enough very good players to make them a contender if they stay healthy and things break their way. The NFL has a lot of teams like that, and there's nothing wrong with being one of them.