The NFL is a copycat league. You saw that with the Wildcat formation last season after the Dolphins used it to beat the Patriots. Soon most teams were running variations of it, and now players are prized for the way they'll fit that particular formation even if they're limited on every other play of the game.
It's a copycat league off the field, too. Once the Giants gained some traction with the "Earth, Wind and Fire" moniker for their stable of running backs, other teams started coming up with their own nicknames. The Cowboys haven't proven immune to the trend. Tashard Choice was sporting a t-shirt that read "I Tash, I Smash and I Dash," (made by Terrell Owens!) in reference to him, Marion Barber and Felix Jones.
The nickname makes some pretty big assumptions. First, it assumes that people won't notice how incredibly derivative the nickname is in the first place. The Titans and Panthers actually feuded over which team's pair of tailbacks had the right to be called "Smash and Dash," which wasn't all that clever in the first place. That saga came to a bloodless conclusion when the Panthers redubbed Jonathan Stewart and DeAngelo Williams "Double Trouble," but we may now have a resumption of hostilities.
The second, and perhaps more crucial, assumption is that Choice is going to play enough to warrant inclusion in a nickname. That's not a slight on his talent, because he flashed plenty of it while filling in when Jones went down with an injury last season, but just a factual analysis of how many carries there are to go around. Ahmad Bradshaw, who played the role of Fire for the Giants, only touched the ball in 12 games last season which shows how hard it is to get playing time even if you're deserving of it.
Give Choice points for making himself integral to the nickname, though. Placing your name first makes it much harder for people to overlook you, a lesson Sears taught the forgotten Roebuck, and he even got his more prominent teammates on board with the idea from day one.
"I like to play with a lot of things," Jones said. "It’s fun he came up with a nickname to kind of describe the attributes we have."
Do we give Choice extra credit for getting Jones to believe that "Tash" is an attribute or do we rethink the University of Arkansas' accreditation as an institution of higher learning?
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That's a debate for later, thought. We'll also have to wait before knowing whether including Tash was the smart choice, so let's agree to use the time to come up with a more original nickname.
