A quick perusal of Tuesday's papers finds a lot of old news being passed off as current events.
The Morning News and the San Antonio Express-News have pretty much identical articles about how the Cowboys are doing just fine despite getting off to a bad start this season. Variations of the riff have been making the rounds since they beat the Texans in Week Three and have only started appearing more often after Sunday's games ended with the Cowboys just a half-game out of first and it's grown more that a little tiresome.
We're not here to argue against the thesis because it is totally correct. Thanks to the general mediocrity/parity of the NFL, the Cowboys are in essentially the same position they would be in if they had won either of their first two games and even a 3-0 start wouldn't have put them so far ahead of the field that it was time to put Jon Kitna into the lineup.
What we're arguing with is the somewhat gobsmacked tone of these pieces. Were there really people out there who though that two losses were going to eliminate the Cowboys from contention for anything other than the first pick in the draft? Obviously you don't want to lose your first two games of the season, but only the least rational among us were seriously thinking that the season was finished at that point.
The Cowboys were by far the most popular pick to win the division and they didn't become a markedly different team because of two losses. Neither did the Eagles, Giants or Redskins. And none of that has changed now that the Cowboys are suddenly deemed as being worthy of respect once again because those teams have played exactly the way everyone expected them to play.
That's why we're calling for a moritorium on references to the "slow start." It is Week Five now and the Cowboys have already had their bye. Those first two games have about as much bearing on what happens going forward as the first two weeks of the 2009 season. You can't use them as a crutch, you can't use them to raise doubts about the quality of the Cowboys and, really, they aren't to be mentioned again unless the Cowboys lose out on a playoff tiebreaker to the Bears because of what happened in Week Two.
At that point, you are hereby authorized to riot in the streets.
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