Hindsight: NFC East Offseason Grades

Lettuce push onwards! Next up, the ultra competitive NFC East.

Breaking Down the Lions Last Drive against the Cowboys

The very much publicized last minute heroics of Matthew Stafford has been shown a number of times and was even NFL Replay’s game of the night last night. But what exactly happened on that last drive that left Kris Durham wide open and Calvin Johnson what may have looked like an easy catch to take him down to the one yard line?

DeMarcus Ware: Transition from OLB to 4-3 DE

Monte Kiffin was hired by the Cowboys to be their Defensive Coordinator despite some red flags: He was 73 years old, and he’d been unimpressive at his last two stops at the University of Tennessee and University of Southern California. (To be fair, head coach Lane Kiffin was probably a much bigger cause of those teams’ struggles.) The Cowboys had been one of the most recognizable 3-4 teams in the league, with their man-to-man cornerbacks and a Hall of Fame player in DeMarcus Ware at Outside Linebacker. So, understandably, the move to Kiffin’s 4-3 Tampa-2 style of defense was criticized in the offseason as being a waste of personnel talent. Maybe, though, the man who invented the Tampa-2 defense and won a Super Bowl behind it still has some tricks up his sleeve.

The Dallas Cowboys Draft Board Shows What A Mistake They Made

First off, I’d like to apologize for the recent lack of content on the blog. Some time away from the home office combined with the general lack of news on the NFL front in the post-draft summer doldrums left me without much time to write or much to write about.

I’ll be writing more as the summer progresses and there’s more and more interesting news about the NFL. In the meantime, though, here’s one short item that ties in to something I wrote previously…

Four More Teams, Part 3

I started this column by picking four teams whose drafts I wanted to critique, just as in the last two posts, but as I began writing, I started to include off-season moves and recent drafts for context, and I began to notice that these organizations all seem to have some systemic problems.

I try to examine why. Not surprisingly, I think in many cases it goes back to the owners. Poor owners make poor hiring decisions, either because they don’t evaluate front-office talent well or because good front-office talent doesn’t want to work with them because of the owners’ flaws, from stinginess to excessive meddling to general incompetence.

Let’s look at how the recent moves these teams made fit into a chain of bad decision-making– and, in one case, how they could be signs of an end of an era of it. This one’s a fair bit longer than the last two…