Tom Orsborn also believes that T.O. appears to be a changed man in this article. He includes some Q&A with continued discussion over Roy Williams’ role in Dallas.

Speaking of Roy, Greg Ellis wanted to clarify his feelings about Roy. 

"I want everybody to understand how I feel about Roy," Ellis said. "Roy is my personal friend of mine -- not just a teammate, but I view him as a friend. So if anything ever gets twisted or distorted in any way, you're hearing it live, whoever is listening right now, from my mouth - Greg Ellis' mouth - that Roy is my friend, a guy I could honestly say that I love. I would never, ever say anything intentionally bad about Roy."

It looks like Spygate will not go any further if Roger Goodell has his way.

As noted by BTB-regular HutHut in this FanPost, our old friend Troy Hambrick just got sentenced to five years for selling rock. 

Over at Deadspin, they have a post from sportswriter Mike Fisher detailing his very rocky relationship with Charles Haley.

Mark me down as a guy who spoke too soon. Yesterday I posted that the "Greg Ellis comments on Roy Williams" story was played-out. Au contraire. Seems that partly based on those comments Roy Williams was summoned to the principal’s office. OK, so it wasn’t totally the Ellis comments that got Roy a meeting with coaches Brian Stewart and Brett Maxie. He also missed two teaching sessions last week while working on plans for his Mother’s Day charity program. Combine those two items together and some at Valley Ranch were starting to question his commitment to the Cowboys. When you throw in some points made by those inside and outside the organization that Roy’s problems on the field stem less from talent deficiencies and more from preparation deficiencies, you got a situation where the air needed to be cleared. As usual in situations like this, everything is hunky-dory, at least on the surface. 

"The communication was not there last year," Williams said. "We recognized the problem, and we talked about it. And we're going to move forward now. We have a better understanding."

Did you expect to hear anything else? I didn’t.

Now, as I speculated earlier, Roy wasn’t keen on Ellis dragging his name into the conversation. He realizes that Greg was trying to defend him, but he believes, like I did, that it didn’t really help the situation and that if Roy wants to complain about things he can handle that on his own behalf.

"I appreciate what Greg did, but at the same time, I'm a grown man, too, and I can speak for myself," said Williams, who still considers Ellis a friend. "If I want to be heard, I will be heard."

That was my major issue with Greg’s comments. Let Roy speak for himself. Then again, maybe Roy shouldn’t speak at all if he’s going to say stuff like the following.

"I'm tired about worrying about the fans," Williams said. "The fans are only around when things are good. I want supporters. At the end of the day, we're human beings, too. Everything can't be perfect, and you can't let your emotions rule over you being a human being. It gets to a point where you are abusing who you really are as a fan."

Yikes. First, Roy has taken on the media and blamed them for writing poisonous things about his play, now he’s taking on the fans. That’s a sure-fire losing combination and Roy should be smarter than that.

Here’s the bottom-line though; just play like you did in the first couple of years in the league and all will be forgiven. We know that Roy is not a good cover-safety, but playing intimidating defense with big hits, turnovers and plays behind the line of scrimmage was a good trade-off. Last year, we didn’t see that. Only Roy’s run-support was decent from last year and while that’s important, we expect more from Roy Williams.

The Dead Zone. We don’t have another OTA until May 20^th. Pacman and his team have gone underground and haven’t uttered a peep. Greg Ellis spiced things up briefly but even that has been played-out. The only thing people are really talking about is the Cowboys star-turn in HBO’s Hard Knocks series. Naturally Steve Sabol and crew are very excited about getting the Cowboys to agree to expose their deepest, darkest secrets to a cable audience. Of note is that after the Cowboys did Hard Knocks in 2002, the series was dormant until the Kansas City Chiefs revived it last year. The reason? Besides the Summer Olympics one year, NFL Films couldn’t find a team to agree to do the series. I wonder why? They certainly weren’t going to get access to the Cowboys while the Tuna was here. Now that Jerry Jones is running the team his own way again, and with the affable Wade Phillips as the coach, the Cowboys are back in the business of Hollywood. Not everyone agrees it’s a good idea.

BTB-regular Nelson posted a FanPost wondering if the Cowboys should pursue recently cut Packers receiver Koren Robinson. Pat Kirwan agrees that Dallas should take a look and has Robinson ranked as the #4 talent in the NFL still looking for a team. 

4. Koren Robinson, WR: Just released by the Packers and young enough to still have a good career. He has return skills as well as being a big target. A team like Dallas should take a look at him.

Adam Schefter is also talking free-agents, but he’s discussing the guys for the 2009 season . A couple of Cowboys makes his list of the top-10 potential free agents in 2009.

4. Marion Barber, Cowboys running back –- Last season, one NFC coach said Barber is an elite back in the same class as LaDainian Tomlinson or Adrian Peterson. Now he wants to be paid that way.

8. Terrell Owens, Cowboys wide receiver -– At the age of 34, T.O. is performing like he were 24.

Don Banks does excellent work in breaking down what the 80-man roster limit means now that there are no exemptions for NFL Europe and the limit will be strictly enforced.  

The potential ripple effect that will be spawned by the simmering controversy threatens to impact everything from the amount of throwing starting quarterbacks may be forced to do in camp, to the elevated playing time and risk of injury for veterans this preseason, to the decreased opportunity that rookies will receive in their bids to make an NFL regular-season roster.

One prime example of the difficult internal roster decisions that are now unfolding revolves around the issue of how many specialists teams can afford to bring to camp. Before this year, standard operating procedure was to bring two kickers, two punters and two long-snappers to camp. That's a luxury not likely to continue at the 80-man limit.

There’s a lot more in the article. Check it out.

Spygate lumbers on as we find out the Patriots were not only stealing defensive signals, but went after the Dolphins offensive signals on one occasion. The article also describes how the Patriots organization went from amateur film-makers in the beginning to quite accomplished film-makers by the end of their escapades.

This is a really sad story.  Former Cowboys safety and current Jets player Abram Elam lost his older brother to a shooting death. All the more sad because it’s the third sibling he’s lost to gunfire.

Greg Ellis just needs to employ a self-imposed gag order during the offseason. The last couple of years it was all the stuff about his contract and not fitting into the Cowboys 3-4 system. Now, he’s talking about another player not being comfortable in Wade Phillips’ 3-4 system. Here’s what Greg had to say about Roy Williams in an interview today. 

"Roy told me in training camp, he said, 'Greg this defense does not fit me. I don’t fit in well with this defense at all,' " Ellis said. "Obviously, it came to be true just like he said. He doesn’t fit what’s going on here in Dallas right now. Maybe this year, if they decide to keep him for this season Wade and them would kind of adjust some things to fit him better."

In truth, the part about Roy not being comfortable in Wade’s system is no big deal. I don’t know why that’s causing such a stir since Roy said the exact same thing in an interview last week. 

"I'm going to have to get comfortable in the system," [Roy Williams] said. "It's not easy with the coaching change. You're used to one thing and then you have to adjust to another playing style."

So he was just repeating what Roy already said and Greg was doing it in a defense of Roy. But dropping the "if they decide to keep him for this season" is not really something you want to say about a teammate. But we know that Roy isn’t going anywhere for this season, Dallas just doesn’t have the personnel at safety to do that. Then Ellis went further by saying:

"The bothersome thing for me as Roy’s friend and his teammate, I hate the criticism he is getting," Ellis said. "I hate the fact how he is kind of isolating himself from the team."

Now he’s making it sound like Roy is bailing out on his team and not interacting with the rest of the guys. That’s not really something you want to say about a teammate in public. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, that stuff that should stay in the clubhouse.

When Ellis was called about it later, he did offer this defense of his comments:

"Everybody is saying they need to get rid of him, they need to trade him. I think he gets a bad rap," Ellis said by phone. "One thing you can’t say I said about Roy is that he should be traded or let go. I think he should stay my teammate. When someone asks me a question, it’s my job to be on Roy’s side and that’s what I was doing. I don’t think he should go anywhere. He should stay here."

Greg, do yourself a favor. If you want to discuss your own problems with the Cowboys organization like you did the last few years, that’s one thing. But dragging your teammate into it is probably something better left alone.

Hat tip to quincyyyyy for posting this in a FanPost. 

Daniel Polk is trying to follow in the footsteps of Patrick Crayton and Isaiah Stanback. 

Bobby Carpenter, is it his last chance? 

Todd Archer talks WR’s.