I’ll be honest, I haven’t felt this optimistic since I met my wife in a bar and she’s had way too much to drink.  This could really be our year, and by “our” I mean that a bunch of sociopaths who happen to wear the laundry of a team I grew up rooting for, and who are led by a megalomaniac with seemingly no socially redeeming qualities could do really well and maybe win the Super Bowl, ensuring that they get eternal fame and short-term fortune, (fortune that history tells us a good 16% of them will lose), while I still have to get up and go to work the next days.  But HOW ‘BOUT DEM COWBOYS!!!!

A word about my Cowboys fandom.  I am first and foremost a baseball fan.  If it weren’t for KSK and you degenera  fine people I would probably pay very little attention to football.  While all pro sports are a cynical business run by narcissists and played by at best single-minded obsessive mesomorphs and at worst by violent psychotics who should probably be locked up for their own and society’s good, the NFL just seems to take everything one step higher.  If the Cowboys win, yay; if they lose, whatever, the sun’s still going to come up tomorrow.

The reason I root for the Cowboys is literally laundry.  One Christmas one of my parents bestowed football jerseys on my brother and I.  I honestly don’t recall either of us ever paying attention to football before this.  His was #32 and black and gold.  He’s rooted for the Steelers ever since.  Mine was Leroy Jordan’s 55 in white, blue and silver.  I rooted for the Cowboys since that day.  Just think, if Mom or Dad had purchased a Patriots jersey I’d be even more of an insufferable asshole than I am today, and that’s coming from someone with a law degree!  FWIW at some point I acquired a hand-me-down Steve Grogan jersey.  I announced that the Patriots were now my second favorite team, then realized that they sucked and like any good 12 year old never paid them any more attention.

Enough about me.  I have been asked to preview the Cowboys’ upcoming season and preview it I shall!  I even did some research and I’m not even going to bill you for it.  Onward invisible friends!

Last year the Cowboys did pretty well.  They lost in the Conference semis when the referees fucked them over on Dez Bryant’s TD catch.  And it was a catch.  I will not accept any argument on this.  On the other hand I will fully and readily concede that the only reason that the Cowboys were even in a position to get fucked over like that is because the week before they beat the Lions when the referees fucked the Lions over even harder.  Karma, as they say, is a bitch.

That whining aside the Cowboys benefited from a fantastic running game, what is possibly the best offensive line in the league, and certainly top 5, an All-World WR in Dez Bryant, decent supporting receivers in Newman and future member of the Wes Welker “Where Am I” club Cole Beasley, the apparently ageless and indestructible TE-and-QB-binkie Jason Witten and a surprisingly not-shitty defense.  Oh, and also Tony Romo was fucking amazing last year.

Seriously, look at those stats again.  34 TDs, 9 interceptions.  Less than 4,000 yards passing, which is low these days, but keep in mind that the Cowboys ran the fuck out of the ball last year.  They didn’t need Romo to throw for 400 yards a game when Murray was spray-tanning his way to 150 a game.

So how did the Cowboys do off-season?  I would argue that they did very well.  Yes, they lost Murray, but the Cowboys ran the ball 508 times last season and Murray had 506 of those carries.  I kid; I think he actually had 396 and was well over 400 when the post-season is included.  Historically RBs with that kind of a workload do not age well and Murray has never, until last season, been known as injury-free.  I wish him all the best with the Eagles but I can’t blame the Cowboys for letting him limp away.  On the other hand the Cowboys didn’t replace him either.  Yes they signed Darren McFadden but next to McFadden Murray is Bronko fucking Nagurski when it comes to playing hurt.  McFadden is Fragile with a capital FRAGILE and he’ll play an entire season when I start working the entire day without taking breaks to make dick jokes.  McFadden is backed up by Joseph Randle, assuming Randle can learn to pay for his cologne and underwear, and Lance Dunbar, a RB trying to return from a broken patella.  Or maybe that’s Ryan Williams.  Whatever, if either of them is starting the Cowboys are probably going to be passing anyway.  Still, with that offensive live and the attention that opposing teams are going to have to give the passing game I think anyone the Cowboys line up at RB will be respectable enough that Murray’s loss will not be overly significant.  It’s not going to be insignificant mind you but I think they can overcome it.  And again long-term they’re going to be better off without the albatross of a contract that Philadelphia may be dealing with.

The Cowboys also drafted very well, for them, and improved their defense both through that draft, through free agency and through players returning from injury.

A word about the Cowboys drafts.  They’ve gotten pretty good at it and I think it’s mostly because Stephen Jones is now old enough and strong enough to restrain his father.  Stephen also knows enough about football to know that he doesn’t know enough about it to run a draft himself and that Jerry knows even less and needs to be muzzled.  Thanks to that realization the Cowboys have spent the last few years building a really good and really young offensive line, and they didn’t draft Johnny Manziel.  Neither of which would be the case if Jerry were running loose.  So thank you Stephen.

The first round pick was UCONN product Byron Jones.  This is probably not going to work.  UCONN is a terrible, terrible, terrible program and I suspect that Jones pulled a Mike Mamula and just ass-fucked the combine, causing scouts and GMs to drool and overlook the fact that Jones played for a team that won 2 games all year and one of those was against a D-1A program.  And it was fairly close.

Seriously, UCONN is terrible at football.

I hope I’m wrong about Jones because the Cowboys secondary is notable chiefly for selling so many jerseys, primarily because the fans have the numbers fresh in their memory after getting excellent views of the players’ backs while said players are chasing after yet another receiver who has broken free in the backfield and high-tailing it for the end zone.  God, Brandon Carr can’t really be that bad can he?  Honey Badger has to get better right?

In the second round the Cowboys lucked into Randy Gregory, by some estimates a Top 10 talent who saw his stock drop like Enron because he smoked some pot, possibly because he has depression.  Peter King will tell you that this is a character defect.  Myself I’d prefer my depressed athletes smoke a little pot rather than the shit that doctors will prescribe you.  I have high, (giggle), hopes for Gregory and the effect he’ll have on the D.

I also look forward to the return of Sean Lee.  A very good linebacker he was sorely missed last season after blowing out his ACL in the spring.  Apparently he’s not as gritty as his pale complexion suggests.  But he’s back and, if he’s healthy, I think will really help the linebacking and by extension the entire defense.

The Cowboys also, as you may have heard, signed noted psychopath and gun aficionado Greg ‘The Kraken’ Hardy.  After Week 5 Hardy should solidify what was last year a surprisingly decent front, terrorizing quarterbacks, bolstering the defense and making any fan with even a modicum of morality question why he watches this fucking game.  Jesus god at least baseball players don’t throw their significant others onto couches full of guns.

The Cowboys also sign La’el, (The the) Collins, an LSU player and potential first round draft pick who went undrafted because of an investigation into the murder of his ex-girlfriend and her unborn child.  To be fair he was never named as a suspect, a fact that the police emphasized repeatedly and he appears not to have been involved but holy fuck Cowboys.  You better be right.  Still, if, as it appears, Collins did have nothing to do with the whole murder thing the Cowboys got another 1st round talent outside of the first round, and in fact outside of the draft.  And their offensive line is even younger, better and, in the future, cap-friendly.

So what does this mean for the Cowboys in 2015.  Well their schedule doesn’t exactly fill me with fear.  The Patriots in Week 5, the Seahawks in Week 8 and the Packers in Week 14 are really the only teams that would concern me.  Yeah, yeah, any given Sunday and all that but let’s face it, the Giants and [*Redacted] s have been horrific the last couple of years and I don’t see any real reason to think either team has gotten much better this year.  The Eagles made a lot of noise but Chip Kelly might be insane and I’d want to see how they actually play for a few weeks before considering them a threat.  Also they don’t have a QB.  Look at those three faces at the top of the linked page.  If I were an Eagles fan I would throw a battery at my computer. The NFC East gets to play the NFC South this year and what those guys did last year can’t even be considered football.  Ditto for the AFC East, with the nerve-grating exception of the Patriots.  The Jets are a dumpster fire and I don’t trust Buffalo or Miami to be very good, although both should be better than they have been.

Regular season the Cowboys best result, barring injury or Greg Hardy’s girlfriend burning the toast, is realistically 12-4 or 13-3.  They should win the NFC East handily and waltz into the play-offs with a bye.  Tony Romo will then take his wife on a Mexican vacation during the bye week, contract diarrhea and throw 2 backbreaking interceptions in the Cowboys second-round play-off loss.

Because Tony Romo is an asshole.

Seriously, they could win the Super Bowl but there’s no fucking way I’m going to predict that.