From my local paper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Despite veteran wide receiver Joe Horn wanting to be traded, Falcons general manager Thomas Dimitroff said there is nothing doing on that front. Horn's agent has been cleared to gauge interest in Horn with other teams but, as of now, there are no takers.

The Dallas Cowboys, who could be in need of a veteran wide receiver if Terry Glenn (knee) isn't medically cleared, were one of the teams queried by Horn's agent, but there hasn't been any talk between Dallas and Atlanta about a deal.

"I've made no contact with Dallas or they with me," Dimitroff said in a text message.

I was going to spend some time thoroughly trashing this article, but I just didn’t have the patience to do it. Maybe you guys can do it for me in the comments.

MB3, fantasy stud?

Outlook: Barber is going to be a stud this year. He will fall to the end of the first round, but he might have more upside than Clinton Portis, Frank Gore and Larry Johnson based on the offense he plays in and his past performance. If Barber is there starting at No. 7 overall in the first round, think about drafting him in that spot.

For a wide receiver corps that was very productive last season – ok, you need to throw Jason Witten into that mix for it to really ring true - the Dallas Cowboys WR’s sure get a lot of scrutiny. The storyline going into the draft was they needed to pick up a young receiver with speed to plan for a future without Terry Glenn and possibly Terrell Owens, who was in the last year of his contract. I wrote about this paradox of production vs. perception earlier in the offseason and it’s a topic still being debated. Terry Glenn and the Cowboys are trying to work out a contract compromise, but as of yet they’ve failed to reach that goal. The debate over T.O.’s future is now moot after he signed a new deal that will have him end his career as a Cowboy.

Recently, the rumor that Dallas was having an internal debate about going after Atlanta WR Joe Horn has hit the media airwaves. As some have cleverly noted, maybe the Joe Horn rumor was a negotiating ploy by Jerry and Co. Perhaps they were saying to Glenn: "If you don’t want to be our aging, injury-prone receiver, then Joe Horn can be our aging, injury-prone receiver." Who knows what the real truth is behind that rumor but coincidentally or not, Glenn is making noise about working out a deal and has hired back his former agent and talks are happening.

The Star-T has an article on the Glenn situation that doesn’t cover anything new than what was reported yesterday, but contains this curious paragraph at the end.

The Cowboys are encouraged by the progress Glenn has made but are concerned about his durability — and possibly his effect on the team.

According to a source, there are those in the organization who think Glenn’s return for the playoffs might have had a negative impact on his replacement, Patrick Crayton. Despite a solid regular season in which he posted career highs with 50 catches for 697 yards and seven touchdowns, Crayton played poorly in the NFC divisional playoff loss to the eventual Super Bowl champion New York Giants.

That’s just nutty. That statement suggests that Patrick Crayton is so weak-minded that the presence of Glenn caused him to have one of his worst games when it mattered the most. I find it hard to believe that such an occurrence is the truth. Crayton has always – warranted or not – appeared to be supremely confident in his own abilities and isn’t afraid of running his mouth to prove it. Of course, there is the old maxim that the most vocally confident are really just masking massive insecurities. Let’s stay away from the pop-psychology for the time being and figure that this source is feeding us a big helping of bunk. It’s not like Crayton hasn’t played before with Glenn on the field for several prior seasons. More likely, Crayton just had one of those days and unfortunately had it when the Cowboys needed him the most.

Thanks to DCFanatic I was able to post below video of Terence Newman’s recent foray into TV broadcasting. Newman was pretty good but if you watch the video, I think Tank Johnson would have been the better choice. That guy has an infectious personality. But the experience was enough for Newman to consider a career after football.

"TV might be the way to go," he said. "It's definitely a good experience; a good way to see whether I like it or not. Getting a chance to be hands-on and take on questions and ask questions, it's a good experience for sure."

One of the more interesting things Newman said in his stint on NFL Live was that he considers anything less than a Super Bowl to be a failed season for Dallas this year. Sure most players believe that but usually don’t express it in such black-and-white terms. He expressed a similar sentiment in the DMN article linked above.

"The expectations will always be high," Newman said. "I don't care who you have on your team, everybody expects to win the Super Bowl or a playoff game when you get to a certain level. Last year, we expected to go to the Super Bowl and win it. I think we will have the same expectations this year."

Most of us believe that the Cowboys roster is as strong as it’s been since the ‘90s dynasty and should compete for Super Bowl. Personally, my own goal for this team is to at least win a playoff game, and then I’ll worry about the Super Bowl. I just can’t handle another season of losing the first playoff game.

What’s your level of expectations for this team; what is considered success and what is considered failure?

It’s always nice to have a Dallas Cowboys rumor floating around. The rumor du jour is the Cowboys are having an internal debate about acquiring the services of Atlanta WR Joe Horn. Sometimes I dismiss these sources inside Valley Ranch that say the Cowboys are having an internal debate about so-and-so, but then I remember that we had the same rumor a little bit before we traded for Pacman Jones, so maybe there is some merit to this story.

Joe Horn was once a top-quality WR in this league when he played for the Saints, but his time in Atlanta hasn’t exactly been scintillating. Maybe its age catching up with him or the total dysfunction that’s been going on in Atlanta over the past few years. Whatever the case, he wouldn’t be more than a quality vet that could become a part-time safety net but he’s not going to be that front-line #2 WR to complement T.O. at this stage of his career. If the Cowboys want to bring him in I wouldn’t have a huge problem with it but it might stunt the growth of guys like Sam Hurd, Isaiah Stanback or Miles Austin. It’s a tough decision, one made more complicated by the cloudy issue of Terry Glenn’s return.

The funny thing is the conflicting points made by Ed Werder in his article and Adam Schefter in his article.

Werder on Horn.

Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones has initiated some internal discussion about whether acquiring wide receiver Joe Horn from the Atlanta Falcons is an option they should pursue to have a veteran starter opposite Terrell Owens, a team source confirmed.

Those within the organization opposed worry that Horn's volatile personality makes him incompatible with Owens and could cause other conflict in a locker room that already includes Adam "Pacman" Jones and Tank Johnson.

So according to Werder, it’s not Horn’s skills that are the worry but his personality and how he might interact with his team.

Now here’s Schefter on Horn.

Horn could help the Cowboys on and off the field. On the field, Horn is not the receiver he once was, but he still could contribute to Dallas’ high-powered attack. Off it, he could provide an example for the way professionals are supposed to act. Horn is one of the league’s more respected players and the Cowboys locker room would be better with him in it.

Ha! So which is it? Horn is a volatile personality waiting to explode and the Cowboys locker room might be the place for him to ignite? Or is he one the most respected professionals in the league who could set an example for others?

 Any takers on this issue?

I also like this piece from Werder’s article.

Those who oppose trading for Horn prefer to continue seeking Detroit's Roy Williams or Arizona's Anquan Boldin and urge Jones to remember he has Patrick Crayton and can trust former undrafted free agents Sam Hurd and Miles Austin with additional playing time as they develop.

Uh yeah, I think the ship has sailed on acquiring Williams or Boldin for this year. Their value was never higher than around the draft, I can’t see either of those teams dealing them now. Crazier things have happened but I wouldn’t count on it in this case. If you’re saying don’t trade for Horn because you want to get one of those other two; you’re essentially just saying don’t trade for Joe Horn.

Hat tip to my co-blogger Tuna Helper for bringing up the rumor in this article and to Starred4Life for creating a FanPost on the rumor.

The Internet. Ain’t it grand? I use it for all kinds of things. Even trivial stuff, like if I see an actor on a TV show and I think I’ve seen them before but can’t remember where or their name, I’ll look it up on IMDB. Or Google Maps, what a wonderful invention. There are hundreds of things you can do on the Internet. And that’s without brining up porn!

So every morning I do my ritual check of a select number of sites for the news of the day. It includes regular news and sports news. One site I use is the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which is my local newspaper. Usually I’m checking the Georgia Tech news and the Braves or the Hawks. While I’m there I occasionally check on the Falcons to see what they’re up to which is what I did this morning. They have an article up talking about their mini-camp and part of the headline was that Joe Horn wants out. The first thought that entered my mind was – vet WR who was once a pretty good player, I wonder if the Cowboys would be interested. That’s how conditioned I am nowadays about the Cowboys WR position. It wasn’t a matter of logical thought; it was just the first thing that popped into my head. The logical thought followed immediately after and went something like this – he’s kind of old and the Cowboys need to get younger at that spot, he’s not exactly the type of player we want across from T.O. anyway, and really, the likelihood of him getting traded is minimal so why am I even thinking about it. So I dismissed the whole thing in a blink of the eye.

I continued my morning surf and ended up over at the Sports Illustrated NFL page and bam, right there in the Truth and Rumors section was the headline: Is Horn heading to the Cowboys? What the…this couldn’t be true. Just minutes after having a millisecond thought about the possibility and then totally dismissing it, here was a headline positing that very thing. So I clicked through to see what was going on. Lo and behold – don’t you hate it when pompous writers use lo and behold – the headline led to a post on the DMN blog . 

This is where I kind of smiled in bemused disbelief. It’s amazing how the Internet works and how the lines between fact and fiction, substance and idle thoughts, become confused. The link led a Timmy Mac post that was nothing more than the kind of space-filling blog post that we all do during the dead-zone. Timmy Mac was just putting it out there for something to talk about without any hint of some kind of deal actually being worked on. I get it, we all do it, just throwing something out there to talk about without any serious consideration of it happening. But the fact that SI.com picked it up and put the headline on it - Is Horn heading to the Cowboys? – makes it seem like something might be going down.

There’s no real point here, I just found it amusing. In the 24/7 world of football news even the dead-zone must have filler. So there you have it, the inner workings of idle speculation leading to rumor in an Internet second.