Ability and volatility, playmakers and haymakers.
Just weeks after we all declared the Dallas Cowboys Stephen Jones' team, as the Dallas Star-Telegram's Clarence Hill did, the new-look Cowboys are decidedly old-school. Two decades after a team full of electrifying talent and terrifying off-the-field issues won three Super Bowls in four years, the Cowboys are trying to turn back the clock.
As Bleacher Report's Mike Freeman wrote, Randy Gregory is just the latest high-risk, high-reward player who figures to play a huge role in bringing a championship back to Dallas this season...and the Cowboys' current opening at tailback leaves the door open for another.
The 2014 season was a welcome return to elite football in Dallas. After four straight years of .500 or worse results, the Cowboys went 12-4 and won their first playoff game since 2009. They fell agonizingly short of a berth in the NFC Championship Game, and the team that barely beat them very nearly made the Super Bowl too.
After a few years of spending top dollar and top draft picks on the offensive line, the Cowboys again have one of the league's very best units. Their balanced, explosive offense, featuring a dominant, mercurial receiver, is again one of the league's most prolific. The defense doesn't yet stack up to the legendary units Jimmy Johnson presided over but made enormous strides last summer and looks set to do so again.
“We believe we have the right kind of environment here," head coach Jason Garrett told NFL Network, per Pro Football Talk's Michael David Smith. "Some of the off-the-field concerns that we have with Randy, we feel like we can help address." As we've seen over the years, strong football coaches like Bill Belichick, and strong football organizations like his New England Patriots, can support and include volatile personalities. The Cowboys, however, are not the Patriots, and Garrett is not Belichick.
If the additions of pass-rushers Greg Hardy and Randy Gregory can put the Cowboys over the top, it'll be exactly 20 years since the last Cowboys championship—and 19 years and 11 months since Cowboys Hall of Famer Michael Irvin was found in a hotel room full of cocaine and prostitutes, as described by Sports Illustrated at the time.
In 1996, there was no Twitter. There was no TMZ. There were 24-hour news networks, but not a 24-hour media cycle; the offseason travails of athletes wasn't really news yet anyway.
If Johnny Manziel legally drinking champagne and legally riding an inflatable swan in a legal hotel pool set off a 48-hour media feeding frenzy, imagine body-camera footage of a coked-up Cowboy asking police if he can tell them his name breaking the Internet.
Winning used to be not just everything in football, but the only thing. The world of the NFL has changed dramatically in the past two decades, though—even the past two years. Non-traditional fans of all stripes are now part of the NFL's core revenue base. An unfathomable array of NFL-branded goods line the walls and fill the closets of millions of Americans. As America's Team, countless fans of every age, gender, race and creed gladly brand themselves with the silver star.
How many woke up today and thought twice about that Cowboys T-shirt? How many are rushing out to buy Nike Randy Gregory Cowboys jerseys or New Era Cowboys draft hats? Probably an awful lot, but maybe not quite as many as might have had the Cowboys gone a different direction.
Cowboys fan reaction on Twitter was largely positive, as collated by Steven Mullenax of Cowboys blog The Landry Hat. Another Cowboys blog, Blogging the Boys, polled its readership and found 86 percent thought the pick at least "solid," but 8 percent selected "uh-oh," or "I need a drink." Most fans love the idea of giving Gregory a second chance—but will they want to give him a third?
As Mike Garafolo and Alex Marvez of Fox Sports reported, there's already been a "verbal altercation" between Hardy and teammate Davon Coleman, who called him a "woman beater." It's hard not to recall Cowboys Hall of Fame pass-rusher Charles Haley's long list of reported altercations with teammates (and that Los Angeles Times article was only from 1993!), and wonder if the Cowboys' dressing room isn't turning into a similar powder keg.
Winning still papers over just about every flaw. Jones, and his boss/father Jerry, surely sees a Super Bowl championship as both validation of and vindication for everything he and his father have done until now: dismissing Johnson, hiring a long string of mediocre coaches in his stead, questionable draft decisions and building the most outrageous sports edifice in human history. If this squad can win it all before the lit fuse burns all the way down to the charge, maybe it'll all be worth it.
But just how much tarnish can the Joneses, or Cowboys fans, stand to see on that star?
Will a rogue's gallery of troubled talents be received as well in the 2010s as they were in the 1990s? Will the glory and thrill of playing the league's best for the highest possible stakes still feel as good when the media are cracking old jokes about barbed wire and guard towers around the Cowboys training facility?
If one or more of the new Cowboys does something awful and gets hauled away in handcuffs—before or after the Lombardi Trophy comes back to Big D—will this challenge for the championship still be worth the risk?
How about it, Cowboys?