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Cowlishaw: Sparse off-season activity showed Cowboys believe they have a winner

10:36 PM CDT on Friday, July 23, 2010

Column by TIM COWLISHAW / The Dallas Morning News | wtcowlishaw@dallasnews.com




SAN ANTONIO – The rules related to the Cowboys signing free agents were somewhat restrictive. There was not an abundance of talent available at positions of need. Uncertainty about a future salary cap for 2011 and beyond loomed.

Still, when the NFL entered an uncapped era this off-season – however brief it may be – you would have expected Jerry Jones to find a way to make a splash.

Somehow. Some way.

If nothing else, you figure he would have gone out and signed a kicker with NFL experience to compete with David Buehler.

It didn't happen.

Jones said he didn't want Buehler to have anything but "every unfettered opportunity in camp" to win the job.

And so, draft aside, the Cowboys were as quiet as they have ever been for the last six months.

An exchange of disappointing first-round picks with St. Louis (linebacker Bobby Carpenter for tackle Alex Barron) was about it as far as significant veterans joining the Cowboys this off-season.

That speaks as loudly to Jones' confidence that a real Super Bowl contender already was in place as all the optimism he tried to contain during Friday's camp-opening news conference at the Alamodome.

Jones was in a joke-cracking mood right from the start – "this is a great organization ... present company excepted," he said – but anytime the questions focused on the talent assembled for the 2010 season, Jones revealed his level of excitement.

"There's just not a whole lot of things not to like about the upcoming season," Jones said. "But we all know the game, the journey that we have ahead of us."

With the Super Bowl coming to north Texas in February and with the Cowboys celebrating their first 50 years along with Emmitt Smith's Hall of Fame induction, the 2010 season might be deemed special even if this roster seemed less worthy.

And one has to be careful when making the assumption that the end of one season serves as a springboard to the next.

The Cowboys were sitting pretty in a nearly identical seat in Oxnard, Calif., two years ago. Some would say there was even more reason for optimism in 2008.

The team was coming off a club-record 13-3 season. Their second-round loss (after a bye in the first) was a close defeat to the eventual Super Bowl champion New York Giants.

Last year's Cowboys finished 11-5 and lost badly in the second round to Minnesota, a team that did not reach the Super Bowl.

But the Cowboys did finally win a playoff game, ending a 12-year drought. And perhaps the lessons learned two years ago when all that optimism faded in a 9-7 season that ended in humiliation in Philadelphia can play a helpful role in 2010.

Regardless, Jones said it was the talent the Cowboys displayed at the end of last season that kept him out of the free-agency hunt.

"It had everything to do with our own roster, looking at what we had, " Jones said. "Getting a player like DeMarcus Ware signed, knowing what was on the way with [signing] Miles Austin and others, that was really the focus."

And unlike their NFC East rivals, the Cowboys have not undergone major change at head coach (Redskins), at quarterback (Eagles and Redskins) or a coordinator spot (Giants and Redskins) heading into 2010.

"To have continuity and have it be a plus, the team has to believe in what the continuity is all about," Jones said. "It's one of the significant reasons we can say we're a better than we were last year or the year before.

"There's just not a lot not to like here as we start."

But after 21 years, Jones knows that the next seven weeks and five exhibition games just barely mark the start of a journey that can take many twists.

Two years ago, a broken pinkie finger on Tony Romo's right hand changed everything. Little things can alter teams' directions, both good and bad in the NFL, and, in fact, they usually do.

Still, it's always better to be in the position the Cowboys take when they hit the practice field today. That's as a team hoping to prevent what might go wrong rather than one simply searching for things that might go right.
 
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