Dallas Cowboys Saturday afternoon roundup

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.