Hello again BTBers, its time once more for our bi-monthly installment of the highly-coveted and eagerly-anticipated FanPost of the Week Award extravaganza. This week (er, weeks) we have several worthy candidates who deserve our favor and attention. In this post-draft, pre-anything lull, our members have gone all creative, authoring posts on a staggering variety of subjects: potential free agents, the possibility of picking up former Cowboys camp sensation Matt Moore, and defenseless receivers (twice) to name a few.
As always, a few FanPosts stood out from the crowd. I would be remiss not to mention a FP which so caught my attention (and, judging from the number of comments, yours) that it inspired a front-page post on the longevity of the current core of Cowboys. For those of you with foggy memories, I refer to 5Blings masterful effort, "How Much Mo' Romo," in which he compares our current signal-caller to former Dallas quarterback Danny White, considers the age in which QBs decline, and speculates on how much longer we can expect Romo to play at a high level. For those unhappy few who haven't had the pleasure of reading Bling's post, go here to do so.
More FPOTW goodness after the jump.
As I said in the opening, there were many worthy candidates for this week's honors. I narrowed the field of nominees down to two posters, and then had to agonize which one should receive the award. Two rivals. One crown. An Epic battle, from which only one could emerge unscathed. Yes, indeedy, folks, this was a close call, a FanPost photo finish.
Coming in second by a nose is a guy who has been of our most prolific posters of late, so much so that he achieved FPOTW superstardom around draft time. He's a young'un, so he writes with his hair on fire, churning out lengthy post after lengthy post. You know who I'm talking about: ChiaCrack. This week, Chia pens the twelfth volume of his excellent but questionably titled "Crack Hits." Inside its pages (and I do mean pages), he teases out connections between the Cowboys and the movie Inception. The gist of this is that both ask us to take a leap of faith. Indeed, Crack details several such leaps he will be taking in 2011, as well as a couple of former leaps that didn't pan out, leaving poor Chia in a broken pile. Chia's stuff is becoming required reading. I'd suggest you go here, to his archive, read his stuff--and then go out and match his prolific rate. I double-dog dare ya!
And on to this week's winner. In one of the front-page comments sections late last week, Chia announced that he had a worthy FPOTW candidate coming down the pike. I replied that he had stiff competition: greatwhitenorth, who recently issued the third installment of his hilarious and painfully accurate series on "Jerry's Draft Rules." In the initial post, North issued six tongue-in-cheek "rules" which govern Jerry Jones' drafting strategy (one of my favorites: "Round 3 is for Proving You’re Smarter Than Everyone Else"). In the second article in the series, he amended the rules a bit and then used them to generate a mock draft. In the latest edition, he uses the 2011 draft to analyze the accuracy of his rules. A taste:
Rule #2: Offensive Line is a Secondary Draft Priority.
As we all know, for the first time in forever Jerry drafted an OT in round 1. But don’t be so quick to dispose of this rule: there were/are several holes along the Dallas OL, and Jerry passed over some quality C/Gs in rounds 2 and 3 to take a futures ILB and a specialty RB (more on Murray in a minute). I’d say the dire situation at RT forced Jerry to change form this once, but attempting to fix the interior OL with fourth and seventh-round picks shows that the rule hasn’t changed.
Rule Grade for 2011 Draft: C-. Future Rule Strength: 9 out of 10
Great stuff. GWN earned FPOTW honors back in early March for first installment of his "Jerry's draft rules" series. I normally wouldn't award a second Rabbie to the same series, but they have been far enough apart and, more importantly, so shrewd and spot-on, that I just had to gift North another golden statuette, not only for his Cowboys know-how, but for his wry humor, which, given the Cowboys recent drafts (48 picks, 6 starters since 2006) is a necessary prescription for Cowboys fans who want to sleep through the night.
Hit the links and check out North's fine, fine work on this series. And then give all our honorees some love in the comments section. It'll make you feel better, I promise.