Wade Phillips is gone. Yay! Now what?

So the up and mainly down Wade Phillips era is officially over, with Jason Garrett taking over as head coach for now. As I assume most Cowboys fan are, I was extremely relieved initially when I heard the news in my Government class, with the parallel of a tumor being removed from a cancer patient coming to mind. However, while this is definitely a step in the right direction, I believe the problem has to be deeper than one bad coach. Jerry Jones said that there will be "changeS" as in plural, as in multiple changes, which leads me to hope he will cut a few players or tell Garrett to bench players, which he will do seeing as he is Jerry Jones' new bitch. This in itself is the problem with our team, Jerry Jones has too much input on what gets done. What Jerry Jones does is attract "stars", bring in stars, build players up to be stars, and pay them like stars all in an attempt to boost his investment. It started in '95 when he brought in Deion Sanders, who was a great player and helped us win a super bowl, but was also a main contributer to the 90s Cowboys downfall. Because Sanders was ridiculously talented enough to slack off at or not show up to practice and still perform well on the field, other less talented players began to follow him. And because they followed Sanders's lead their play deteriorated, and the team's play suffered. The problem I see right now is player's job security. It seems like every player who plays reasonably well for one season gets rewarded with a 6 or 7 year contract now. And while some have deserved it, others have either underachieved completely (Roy Williams) or started to decline after a few years (Marion Barber). As much as I dislike the New England Patriots I recognize their brilliance for how they run their team. Since their first super bowl, the Patriots have had a number of great players walk out in the offseason and sign with other teams for more money. And year after year the Pats come back with great teams, sometimes not as talented as others but always hungry teams, and teams that play together well. Its like in the first super bowl they won, SB 36 I believe, when the St Louis Rams players came out individually and the Patriots came out as a team, and then went on to beat the highly favored, blatantly more talented Rams. In the years after the Rams collapsed after their star players left, rebuilt a little and then collapsed again and are in the process of rebuilding while the Patriots went on to dominate the NFL. The 2010 Cowboys are like the Rams, only with a MUCH worse case of individualism. We are a team of "stars" at virtually every position, but "stars" with no urgency, discipline, or general will to win, so as a team we suck. In terms of players, we need to trade anyone who isn't part of the solution, stockpile draft picks and bring in a bunch of young guys who can push the complacent starters. As a Cowboys fan I was pissed at Nick Collins' hit on Roy Williams and hope he gets fined up the ass, but I also wished someone on our team would do something like that, just to show that were not happy about losing. If we are waiting until we play the Giants to start a fight, make a late hit, generally knock someone out I'm okay with that, but at this point I just want to see some sign of life. Maybe Wade's reaction of "what just happened?" whenever anything goes wrong has rubbed off on the team. I would personally like to see a coach show some emotion after some of the games we've played, and I don't think Garrett is the answer.

But to end on a positive note, lets review why Wade Phillips sucks, and why his firing will help the team. The obvious reason is the team doesn't respond well to his style of coaching, and there is no possible way a change can make us worse. Simply put, we were at rock bottom, and a coaching change can do nothing but help. One testament to Phillip's failure as a coach is how his team has come out after bye weeks. This year we had our one victory over Houston going into the bye. In what should have been the start of a winnings streak, we instead came out with probably the worst opening defensive performance I've ever seen against Tennessee as Vince Young effortlessly moved down the field by throwing up jump balls that were either caught or drew pass interferences every time. Or we can go back to the '07 playoffs when we had a extra week before playing the Giants, who had been winning on the strength of their defensive line, and yet Phillips could not come up with an answer, as the Giants D-line clobbered Romo all day and beat us 21-17. But I think the worst thing about Wade Phillips, and it has been specifically this season, is his defense and specifically its predictability. Defense, especially 3-4 defense, was supposed to be Phillip's speciality, which is why I wanted us to get him after Parcells left. What I heard was that Phillips was good at disguising blitzes, and could get pressure from different positions. While that was true his first two seasons when we got sacks from Jay Ratliff, Bradie JAmes, and Greg Ellis along with dware, who's gonna get 12+ sacks in any system he plays it. But this season it has been all on dware to create pressure. This year our blitzes are ridiculously telegraphed, we bring a bunch of guys to the line, we blitz. I'm pretty sure if I know its coming, a NFL quarterback will be able to read it (the exception being Jon Kitna who reads blitzes like Rain Man reads crossing signals). Also the secondary play has been atrocious, and maybe some of that should be put on Dave Campo, but some of it is definitely Wade's fault, specifically how close to the line the corners play. Last year Mike Jenkins developed into a terrific corner once he started playing bump and run coverage consistently. This year it seems like he's always 8-10 yards off the ball, which is okay sometimes, but it seemed like we did it every play against the packers even in 3rd and short situations and goal line situations. Wade simply lacked the ability to make in game adjustments to help us win. So I for one am very happy he's gone. But we're still a long way from being competitive.