The Cowboys will be sporting a different look this week than they did in Baltimore.
We're not talking about the absence of running back DeMarco Murray or some new scheme installed by Jason Garrett during practice. We literally mean a different look.
The blue jerseys are coming out of storage for use in Carolina this weekend. The NFL leaves it up to the home team to decide which color jersey they'd like to wear every week and most teams opt to wear their darker jersey when playing at home. The Cowboys are an exception, obviously, and that means they wear white almost all of the time.
The Panthers have decided to throw a curveball, though. They're wearing white and forcing the Cowboys to put on the blues, potentially invoking the "curse" that some people seem to think affects the players wearing them.
You can't really blame the Panthers. At 1-4, they need all the help that they can get to win a game this weekend so they might as well see if the metaphysical can work out for them.
The Cowboys last wore the blues during their visit to New England last season, a visit that resulted in a victory for the Patriots. That's what most people would expect, given the Cowboys' long history of losing games whenever they are forced to abandon their beloved white jerseys.
It's not surprising that Belichick did it last year. He came up with Bill Parcells and the Giants, of course, and those were the golden days of gamesmanship to get the Cowboys into the blue jerseys. Those jerseys gained their infamy in the Super Bowl V loss, when the Cowboys were made to wear them by virtue of being the home team for the game. Parcells, Joe Gibbs and other coaches made use of them in the Landry years but the issue has died down a bit since then.
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This will be just the second time in the last three years that the Cowboys have had reason to wear the blue shirts and it would be an awfully good time for them to put to rest any talk about the deleterious effects of jerseys on performance. If they don't, we might start seeing more blue and, of course, feeling more blue over the rest of the year.
