THE DEFENSE
After Wade, the lugubrious play of the defense was a main culprit in this season's failure. Check this: No Cowboys defense has ever...NEVER EVER...given up as many points as this wretched group did this season. Whatever idiot suggested that Alan Ball could be a starting safety in the NFL should be run over multiple times with a dump truck. My gripes with the defense have to start with Ball. He, along with Gerald Sensebaugh, ran a secondary that allowed Quarterbacks to drop back, lick their lips, and FEAST on the Cowboys defense all season. The corner backs did not play well (See Jenkins v. Green Bay, or Philadelphia...Newman looked like an old man... Scandrick's overachieving finally caught up with him) but seemingly on every touch down the Cowboys gave up through the air, our last image was of Alan Ball running off screen a few seconds too late. A lot of the times that the CB's looked like they were beat, it was obvious that they were expecting help from the saftey's over the top...help that rarely came. Then I had to be repeatedly insulted by Alan Ball's tennis ball tackles where he would bounce right off of anything that moved. (Also...Dave Campo, the secondary coach, sucked as a head coach and clearly still sucks as an assistant coach. He might be less than 5 feet tall and you expect players to listen to him? Get him out).
The play of the linebackers also suffered this year. Bradie James and Keith Brooking both looked straight up OLD. For some reason the Cowboys are afraid to play high draft picks so Sean Lee wasn't even given much of a chance to spell the two aging linebackers until late in the season. What did we find out? Lee (if he stays healthy) can be one helluva line backer. Brooking, while his pregame speeches are still fiery, is just too old to be a starting lineback in the NFL. On the outside Anthony Spencer made a great effort to make everyone forget about his great efforts on the field last year. He played most of the season as if he actually didn't know where the Quarterback lined up on the field, because I rarely saw Spencer in that general area. On the other side, Demarcus Ware did lead the league in sacks with 15.5 sacks but it seems that during some of the key games this season, when the boys backs were against the wall, Demarcus was also shut out a lot of the time.
The big guys down in the trenches on the defensive front also significantly lacked in production this year. Jay Ratliff, arguably one of the best nose tackles in the game had a subpar year, his sack and tackle totals diminishing by 1/3 compared with his average of the past two years. In a 3-4 defense the ends and tackles are not normally supposed to accumulate mind-blowing stats but the bottom line is Igor Olishanksy, Stephen Bowen and Jason Hatcher were not eating up enough space for the linebackers to make plays in the running game and they, along with the rest of the (very vanilla) defense, failed to pressure any quarterback with any form of consistency. The entire, and by that I mean every single player with the exception of D-Ware, defense could use an upgrade. (Obviously this is impossible in 1 offseason, so lets start at saftey and work our way forward).
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