Cowboys can look to 2006 ‘Baseball Cardinals’ for inspiration

By Andy Targovnik  |   Wednesday, January 03, 2007  |  Comments( 7 )

Dallas Cowboys
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Maybe Bill Parcells should invite Tony LaRussa to come to Dallas this week, to give a motivational speech to his reeling Dallas Cowboys.

After all, it was LaRussa's 2006 St. Louis Cardinals who were on the verge of the worst year-end collapse in sports history. But they held on, won the division and bumbled into the playoffs.

Less than a month later, they were World Series champions.

The lesson: In sports, the past certainly does not equal the future. That fact certainly holds true for the NFL, a league where parity rules.

Do the Dallas players believe that, though?

After being humiliated by the Detroit Lions less than a week after they were blown out by the Philadelphia Eagles on Christmas, the Cowboys have every right to be convinced they can't beat anybody, much less an opposing NFL playoff team.

And while the last two home losses have been awful body blows, the Cowboys' chances, going forward, are not as bad as they might appear on the surface.

For starters, their opponent, the Seattle Seahawks, are not playing much better than the Cowboys. Even though they beat the awful Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Sunday, the Seahawks had lost their previous three games, against the likes of the San Francisco 49ers and the Arizona Cardinals - neither of which are football powerhouses.

And if the Las Vegas betting line means anything, the three-point spread hardly indicates that Saturday night's game is a mismatch.

However, if the team that has been so careless with the ball, and that hasn't been able stop anyone shows up on Saturday night, it will not win. But is that who the Cowboys really are? The head coach doesn't think so.

"I just think we're capable of playing good football... because I've seen it," Parcells told the media on Tuesday. "So you just got to try to gather that up and get it ready to go. If you do, then you have a chance to win. If you don't, you'll get beat."

Let's face it, the man is right. A team simply doesn't go from being very competitive to an overnight laughingstock. Perhaps the poor results of the last month have been because the Cowboys have been playing bad, not because they are bad.

Again, though, do the Dallas players believe that?

If they doubt it, they just have to remember that a bunch of elated baseball players everybody wrote off last October will raise a World Series banner this April.
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