The thread asked for Year One expectations.
If Herman follows up my expectations with three years like the last two, I suspect he'll be in trouble as well.
But on the bright side, this season has given us the stupidest, most inexplicable fake punt attempt in quite some time. And after all, isn't that what the Cowboys are all about under Jones--comparing freakish moments of misery to ponder which is worse?
He's certainly the most consistently disappointing.
Or maybe we're just looking at this all wrong. Since the Cowboys under Jones are never going anywhere, maybe we should just be happy about a badly injured young man who worked his ass off to steal from Jerry. He's hardly the first one to do it, but he might be the most inspirational.
Well, I guess this season is officially a write off now, even in a historically bad division.
Maybe we should just call ourselves the Dallas (sort of) Football Team for the rest of the year.
And just to officially jinx us, for all our flaws, how does this team not win the NFC East? The Giants are dog meat now, the Washington Football Team is about as exciting as its name, and Carson Wentz has turned into a pumpkin (I guess the Eagles saw that coming with their draft picks). So basically, all we have to do is stagger to the finish line upright.
I'm not saying we're Super Bowl material. But the NFC East? Them's some easy pickins.
Meh.
It might help Dallas make the playoffs a little more often, but it's hard to get too excited about adding another solidly mediocre team, at best, to the playoffs.
This is the part I just don't get. Post-havoc, Shaka has simply defined no functional approach to winning basketball.
WTF. How is that even possible? What does he tell himself in the recesses of his own mind when he watches this team play?
Does he really not know how to do this? Some coaches aren't ultimately successful for a variety of reasons, but it's generally not because they fail open at one of the very first tasks any coach at this level simply must be capable of. It's like we hired a plumber who refuses to disconnect pipes.
Maybe we've been thinking about this all wrong. Maybe Shaka deserves a mulligan for five years because being a college basketball coach is hard. It's even harder if, heaven forbid, you have to play a couple of teams that are considered to actually be good. And we'd all surely agree that this Horns team would be doing better if they played in my neighborhood Pee-Wee league. So maybe we should just thank Shaka for all his effort in such an impossible situation. After all, it's not like we're paying him a bunch of money or anything.
Hmm...
Or we could just say "fuck him" and hire a coach who can field a team that isn't a never-ending embarrassment.
Maybe just being in over his head is the bad luck. It happens to everyone not qualified for the job they have.
At times, though, I still marvel at Shaka. He made his bones with the whole Havoc thing, then decided that wasn't the best system for maxing out at Texas. Okay. Whatever. But he's literally replaced his signature style with... nothing. It's like he picked up "The Idiot's Guide to Basketball" and took stray ideas here and there that he subsequently deploys at random. That's why our play has no rhythm or flow or discernible signs of growth. We just mix and match random components of successful basketball without any higher brain function to integrate them into a style.
That's also why we're so excruciating to watch. It's like watching a musical where no one knows how to dance, there's no choreography anyway, and the music is off key.
WTF?