The Ringer NFL Show - Can the Cowboys Contend In NFC ?

Episode Date: October 6, 2021

Kevin is joined by The Athletic’s Bob Sturm to discuss difference in this season’s Dallas Cowboys, Mike McCarthy, Kellen Moore and early Kyler Murray memories. Then he talks with The Ringer’s Bryan Curtis about the Urban Meyer drama and his thoughts on the Cowboys’s chances?  Host: Kevin Clark  Guests: Bob Sturm and Bryan Curtis  Associate Producer: Stefan Anderson Additional Production Supervision: Arjuna Ramgopal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's happening, everybody? It's me, Jason Gough. And it's a long-time Chicago Media dude. I'm on 10 to introduce you to the full go. A new podcast at The Ringer and Spotify dedicate to all things Chicago sports. We'll be coming to you on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday nights with all the reactions to the locals.

Plus, I'll be chatting with my friends and people who matter in town. If you want to ask a question or fire off one of those absurd barbershop takes, I'll react to your calls on a listener voicemail line too. So whether you're in Lakeview, the Wildhundredk, town, the burbs, or a transplant, make sure you follow the full go on Spotify, wherever you get your podcast. It is the Ringer NFL show. Part of the Ringer Podcast Network.

I'm Kevin Clark. Big question today. Are the Cowboys really good? Joined by Bob Stern. He's a host at the ticket and a writer for the athletic. He is an awesome Cowboys expert. We talk about that. Do a deep dive into the Cowboys.

We also talk about the NFC pecking order. We talk about Kyler Murray. He knows him well. The Arizona Cardinals, where that team goes from here. And just some odds and ends around the league. It was a really, really interesting deep dive discussion. And Brian Curtis from the. Ringer joins us. He's a huge cowboy fan, but we spend a lot of time talking about the Urban

Meyer situation in Jacksonville, which is a complete mess. Okay, a couple of bits of news to get to to Bob. First, upon Gilmore traded to the Carolina Panthers for a sixth round pick in 2023 from the New England Patriots, where he won defensive player the year in 2019. Since 2018, he was PFF's top-rated cornerback coming off an injury. We don't know what Hayah has left, 31 years old. I think that a guy like that who can play man coverage, who can be, even if he's a little bit slowed in the last couple of years can still be extremely viable to a defense. This changes the equation for the Panthers defense a little bit. They are the second ranked, I think, by a lot of metrics defense in the NFL.

They think they can obviously compete now if they're taking on a guy like Gilmore. So it'll be interesting to see that. I mean, there was a whirlwind morning on Wednesday. People thought that he was going to get released at 4 p.m., which would have made him obviously a free agent and free to sign according to sources and people inside the NFL. people thought he might have wanted to go play for the Packers. There were people openly recruiting him. There were other kind of contenders who were thought to be in the hunt if he actually

became a free agent. He didn't. The Panther sidestriped everybody. Good value move is the kind of move you do if you're a smart front office. And yeah, it remains to be seen how much he has left, but it's not a huge deal if this move fails for the Panthers. Secondly, Justin Fields named the starter going forward in Chicago. I don't know what took so long.

long, quite frankly. Looked pretty good with Bill Laser calling plays on Sunday. Hopefully that remains the same. And, you know, Andy Dalton, great. You know, he made a little bit of money. Got a couple weeks to start there. Not healthy at this point. But this gives clarity to the bears.

And we don't have to go, you know, writing all these articles about how it's crazy that Andy Dalton is still QB1 if he's healthy and all that stuff. And I just think that, you know, one of the things about kind of how teams handle young quarterbacks now is that you need to just commit to them and do everything you can to surround them with talent and all that stuff. And a lot of that starts with an announcement like this where you say, okay, we're kind of burning the boats here and we're moving forward Justin Fields. And this was just a necessary step. I'm not going to overpraise Nagy for it. This is what he had to do. But it's nice to have that kind of clarity. All right, let's get to Bob.

All right, Bob Stern. He's a host at the ticket in Dallas. He works for the athletic. He is a cowboys expert. The last time you came on this podcast, Bob, Craig Horlebeck was producing. And after you were done, you were going to go play golf, you were just talking with the cowboys. And Craig said to me, that man seems like he has a very nice life. And I've never gotten that feedback before from any producer. Wow. I, you know, I've certainly played my cards correctly pretty well. So I, you know, the king of Dallas, the king of Dallas, just 36 holes a day. I wish. This is that time of year where golf is a fading memory, but we got the Ryder Cup done, so we're

good to go. That's it. That's it. All right. So, we're here to talk with the Cowboys and whether the Cowboys are good, how good, what does this mean? We were just joking before we started this podcast about how we've transferred from a decade plus of his Tony Romo good to now five years of his DECC got good. We want to dig a little deeper, but I do actually want to tackle the Is Dak Prescott Good question. with a little more nuance.

I want to start with as vague a question as I can possibly do. I want to make my guest life as hard as possible. Is this team different? Yeah, I think it is. How different is a great question. And we can dig into that a little deeper if you want. But they're coming out of a decade of Jason Garrett football. And we can decide to ignore or recognize 2020 as a real thing.

But, you know, when you when you just look at the general circumstances of 2020, you got new coaching staff, you got COVID, you got a broken ankle from your quarterback, you got both tackles who hardly even play. So 2020 was not necessarily the blast off that Mike McCarthy and, you know, change had in mind. But I will say, you know, the circumstances of 2021, getting Dan Quinn in here, getting the, you know, the proper. personnel changes finally actually having an idea where you're going and then getting the deck press contract and injury behind them it does feel like they've turned the corner now we've

had some false dawns here Kevin as you know so so I'm not going to I've noticed that it's all in the rear view of beer but so far it looks very impressive because even their loss looks good so the team released Jalen Smith last night it was interesting to me because first of all, there are a lot of people say, why didn't just cut them beforehand? Well, they couldn't. His salary was guaranteed. He had had surgery.

So the kind of Twitter meme or whatever was mostly wrong, as it normally is. But what does that release tell you about this defense, about the franchise? It was a surprise just in the context of when it happened, but it wasn't like Jalen Smith was worth the money. No, not at all. And so you can definitely separate the casuals from the people that have been keeping close attention on Jalen, just from honestly the time they signed his deal in 2019, which seemed like a deal signed to kind of convince Dak Prescott

to take undermarket value because look at all these other. Anytime you can overpay a linebacker in order to try to bully your quarterback into taking an undermarket deal, you got to do it. I think so. I think, you know, just to prove that they butchered everything in the DAC negotiations, we always have to remember this part of it, which is, hilarious but but you know Stephen Jones for better or for worse in between buying new helicopters has at least admitted that they really got that one wrong so I guess

what else can they do but Jalen has not been good in a couple years and it's it's unfortunate because you know he's he's a really good dude in terms of you know one of those guys you'd be proud of to build your organization around as a human being But just, you know, the realities of the human body are that it was not going to work out. It was getting worse, not better. And really, teams were now starting to use his compensation for his body with false reeds from his head. And so you had this bad situation of mental reads and a body that can't recover. and it just got worse and worse and worse.

I think best illustrated last season in the Baltimore game, which I think was a Fox game, but I think it was a Thursday that ended up being a Tuesday. I don't even remember last year, but I remember, you know, another Ravens touchdown that targeted the linebackers and Orlando Brown yelling into the camera, easy money, which is what it was against the Bullittal and Cowboys defense. And so this was a situation where they had five linebackers for two spots.

One was always going to be Michael Parsons. The other was probably always going to be Keanu Neal and Nicol and late Bandresh in base. And they just had no place for Jalen except they really liked him as a human being. And they knew they wrote him all that giant check. So this was a matter of time. If they had the guts to do it in the 2021 camp, it would have probably been the most. seamless. I think they wanted to wait until 2022 until they had a meeting and said, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. If we keep playing him like this and if he goes on the injured

reserve list, he's actually going to guarantee his 2022 money. So every time we put him out there, there's basically a $10 million gamble on the field that he doesn't get hurt. And so I think they've learned their lesson and asked him to take a redone deal. And hey, can we unattached? to you getting hurt in 2021. He wasn't going for it. He wants a fresh start. I get it. And so it happened last night,

which was certainly awkward timing for most of the Cowboys Nation. Nobody has more meetings where bad things happened than the Cowboys. They had like nine meetings to fire Jason Garrett. They kept dragging their feet. They needed a meeting to be, oh, oh, we might accidentally guarantee

Jalen Smith's salary in 2022. So, Deontay Lee, at Provenable Focus, had a really good piece on the offense today. was interesting about how soft defense set to play them because of the receiver talent. And I thought it was interesting. And essentially his point was that Kellynne Moore calls vertical passing concepts and then off of that does quick game and that there are a lot of easy passes and a lot of layups and easy completions in this offense.

I looked up this morning, Dak Prescott has the fifth lowest intended air yards in the NFL, but obviously he's efficient. What is this offense? How good can it be? and is it going to, is this it? Is it going to get better? Is Kellynne Moore developing? Is it a play called different way?

I mean, you can take this anywhere you want. But what is this offense in 2021, Bob? It's dangerous as heck because they have mismatch problems in just about every spot. I think tight ends pretty ordinary. But even there, they have a couple tight ends who are tricky. And Dalton Schultz is probably better than most people think. And it's probably going to get a better deal than most people think coming up this spring. but just overall, they have a really good triangle of wisdom, I would say,

between an offensive head coach, a play caller who is really coming into his own and sequencing and setting things up nicely. And then a quarterback who is kind of graduated from quarterback school. He's at that precise age where, you know, now everything slows down. You now know the answers to the test. You know the counters to their counter. I think we saw that wonderfully in the Cedric Wilson touchdown on Sunday. against Carolina where, you know, they're going to blitz. He knows they're going to blitz.

They know that he knows. And so they are looking at, okay, what's his hot route? Okay, well, his hot route is going to be the flat to Schultz. And so now he sells, he only sees Schultz here. He's going to pump his shoulders. Everyone's going to run to Schultz. And then Cedric Wilson is going to slip into the secondary completely uncovered. So he's now playing chess. his his competence at the line is unquestioned and really that's that was the trick Kevin looking at last year is that could DAC play in an explosive offense without risking the ball and I think that got away from him early last year and I think he really went to school of okay risk reward I do need to throw the ball into traffic from time to time to keep them honest but for the most part

this team is going to be most efficient when they simply allow the defense to declare how they want to get beat this week. And so if you can do that, and if you can basically average 10 points a quarter and just start marching your way through NFL defenses, and really it will come down to red zone efficiency. Are you kicking or are scoring touchdowns? And if they are, they're going to be really tough for anyone to beat with this offensive line and this quarterback. I want to talk about the defense, but I want to get briefly to the coaching part of it. So Michael McCarthy's in the second season. I thought last year on his part was a disaster. But as you said, they're undoing Jason Garrett football.

And that doesn't happen overnight. I'm curious if you could take me through being around Dallas, what kind of undoing Jason Garrett means in the head coaching context, in the culture context, and just sort of building a new thing when we knew what that was for the better part of a decade. Yeah. And I don't know that I necessarily can. speak for the community because I do think the community is largely skeptical of whether they

actually have a group at head coach, which amazes me, but, you know, it is what it is. So from my standpoint, undoing the Jason Garrett era is about two things in particular. One, it's just a general ethos of attack. We are here to not be concerned. we're not here to to basically uh you know invest in mutual funds and be very careful you know just get our 3% back no we're we're here to double our money uh on a regular basis and so they went from the most conservative coach in in the NFL to one of the most aggressive coaches in terms of going for fourth downs and uh and and and and you know attacking on a regular basis and and i know McCarthy has his his resume or his reputation uh and and and and

To me, as somebody who's followed him since he got hired by Green Bay, very carefully in 2006 and all the way through, I feel like I know I'm like the back of my hand. And I've never really understood, you know, the speed bag treatment he takes from a lot of people in terms of the, I guess the thought is he went toe to toe with Aaron Rogers. And that's like the worst thing you could possibly ever do in a public relations standpoint. And so, you know, you came at the king and you missed, I guess, to use Omar, you know, as our tour guide. But this guy is going for it. He's absolutely playing as if he's bossing the table in poker. And he just wants to be aggressive. And he wants to make you try to meet him with his aggressiveness.

And that's way different than anything we saw with Jason Garrett. And so, for instance, you hire a special teams coach and John Faso. Bowens loves fakes more than anybody loves fakes. And he ran more fakes last year, punts, field goals, onside kicks than Jason Garrett did in a decade. And that's not even hyperbole. That is the fact that he ran more fakes in 2020 than Garrett 2010 to 2019, which just blows the mind of the football, you know, populace here, they don't know how to handle it. And so invariably, as you know, if a fake works, it's great. And if it doesn't work, you're moron. And so, of course, famously,

they try to fake pun against Washington on Thanksgiving that failed miserably. And they all looked like they didn't know what they were doing. So that's aspect number one. Aspect number two is way more important to me. And that is just the general attitude of the organization when adversity hits. And so this can take the form of an injury, a suspension, a short week, back-to-back road games, you know, you name it. The NFL deals you a fair amount of adversity. And the questions then become, are we going to just set up a list of excuses or are we going to say, we don't care. We will play you anywhere. We will play you with half our team, you know, on the COVID list or not present. And we're just, we're next man up. And if we're,

Mike McCarthy has ever been famous for anything in my mind as a Packers coach. And, you know, you're talking to a cheesehead here who followed him closely and definitely knew he needed to go up there. But also knew that I really appreciated several things about his administration up there. And one of them is they played 77 guys in their Super Bowl year. They had an injured list longer than anybody. They had 16 guys on injured reserve when they went to the Super Bowl, which ironically happened here in Dallas. They stayed in a season and won their division when Aaron Rogers was gone for two months with a broken collarbone. They famously beat Jason Garrett and Tony Romo in the Death Star with Matt Flynn in one of the most inexcusable fire Garrett on the spot moments in Cowboys history.

you know, he revived Brett Farr's career. If people look at 05 and 06 Favb and say, how did that guy at age 38 put together in near MVP season and come within one throw of the Super Bowl in 2007? I mean, these are all things McCarthy is done in terms of, look, we got a game on Sunday. I'm not here for excuses and I'm not here for anything. I need to start a rookie right tackle.

Let's start a rookie, you know, let's put him in a position to win. So it's a long-winded and, which of course I'm famous for them. But those are the two things that McCarthy has just absolutely changed the country club of Dallas Cowboys football for me. It was such a country club. We've talked about this in the past, but you go to the training camps, and it's like unlike anything else.

And, you know, I was talking to some of the Chiefs writers on this podcast a couple weeks ago, and we were talking about how if you go to a Chiefs practice, you just get it immediately. You get it. Like, they're just installing their plays. There's no BS. They're just doing everything at 100% efficient. you're like, oh, this is a good team. If you dropped an alien into a chief's practice, they'd say, oh, I get it.

And if you do the same thing with the Cowboys and everybody's on the, and Jason Garrett's peeling off a practice to go talk to some C-List, you know, CSI Miami actor, like, oh, I get this too. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it's kind of maybe why McCarthy is not embraced here is because it's kind of the anti-cowboys brand. You know, the joke here is that you basically seem like you're going through a strip club when you run out onto the field, that little nightclub thing they have at the

stadium. And by the way, and I have not confirmed this yet, but it seems like the cowboys are coming out of another different tunnel these days. So we'll have to follow that story. Tunnel change. I don't know if the coach has said, let's avoid the nightclub. run through at the stadium, but I will continue to follow that story and report back. But it's just, it's basically, can you get a Pittsburgh man of a coal miner stock and put them in,

you know, the around, surrounded by artwork, surrounded by a practice facility that costs more than most NFL stadiums and, you know, Sky Mirror and just all the insanity of Cowboys football. and like I said, helicopters, the Bravo Eugenia. I mean, what owner doesn't have a $300 million yacht? Of course. And so does Mike McCarthy, who looks like the anti-Cliff Kingsbury in terms of a personal body image and great hair, does he make sense as a Cowboys football coach from Central Casting?

And of course the answer is no. And maybe that's the point. And maybe that's what they need. Interesting. Because I was thinking, I'm not a huge. McCarthy then. You were higher on McCarthy than I am, and I'm very sensitive to letting superstar

coaches walk. Kyle Shanahan in Atlanta is a good example. I mean, like, I'm obviously not comparing them, but you even go back to the 50s and I'm not sure how much you've read about it, but, you know, Tom Landry and Vince Lombardi run the same staff in New York, and the head coach there was famous for just reading the newspaper while the other guys did the work. They let Lombardi

and Landry leave the building and mistakes were made. Obviously Kellen Moore is neither. Tom Landry, nor Vince Lombardi. But it's just something to watch. Oh, sure. And so, yeah. Oh, I was just going to say to you,

I want to be clear. I don't think Mike McCarthy is the best coach in the NFL. And I don't know if he's close. I'm comparing him to Jason Garrett and Wade Phillips. Right. No, of course. But my question is, if Kellyn Moore is about to be hired away by the Bears, by the Jaguars,

by the Giants, this time next year, and you're Jerry, and he comes into your office and says, I'm leaving unless you make from the head coach. You stick with McCarthy? That's a great question. I would love to stall by saying I'd like to see how it works out. But I would say two things to that.

Number one, we could make a nice list together of great coordinators that did not translate the great coach. 100%. Mike Marks is on my list. Jack, Jason Garrett might be on my list. So you have that. Number two, this is the Cowboys, and they have, I think they make somewhere between three and four hundred million dollars in profit every single season. Yep.

And you can't really do much with that like Manchester United can in terms of your payroll and your players. But you can money whip your coaching staff at a ridiculous level. And we've seen it in the past. And I submit to you that the best movie. for Kellan Moore is to go through the interview process every January and then circle back and say, yeah, dude. And they just offered me another million on top of what I was already making. Do you guys want to match this? And of course, the Jones family will do exactly what they did with Jason Garrett,

who was offered. I want to say, the Ravens job before John Harbaugh and the Atlanta job before Mike Smith. And in both cases, he just came back and got a raise and stayed here as the coach and waiting. You're our next guy. So I don't think McCarthy's here for a decade for sure. I assume they don't want Kellyn Moore to go anywhere. I'm also a little skeptical about Kellynne Moore standing in front of a room and having the control of everybody. But at the same time, the NFL is hiring guys younger and younger, they don't seem to care about that anymore. So, and just to be clear, like, I don't, I, there are no guarantees that Kellyn Morris be some great head coach. None. I'm just playing it out and saying, I'm not a huge McCarthy fan. I am a huge

fan of Kellan Morris play calls and I'm just gaming that out. I mean, I want to make one thing clear. Arthur Smith, Arthur Smith is a guy who I think a lot of people in Tennessee were saying the same thing about, oh, maybe we should let Rayble go

and bring Arthur Smith. Arthur Smith's make it, I think he'll be fine. I've got a lot of dumb mistakes right now. He's not, if he'd taken over that Tennessee team right now, I think there'd be some real misstep. So I don't think promoting Kellan Moore or anything like that

would be some guarantee of a Super Bowl in 2022. We just super, NFL head coaching is a craft. shoot. I mean, I remember Sean McDermott got legitimately fired in Philadelphia, and he is a top five coach in the NFL. So you just never know on this stuff. No, and that train is coming down the tracks. There's no doubt that as the Cowboys continue to do what they're doing, the Kellan Moore discussion, and for that matter, the Dan Quinn discussion. Yeah. We're going to continue to make things weird for Mike McCarthy. And maybe that's a great problem to have. And maybe that was the point

of hiring McCarthy in the first place is to kind of reset things and then, you know, allow the dominoes to sort of tell you what direction you're headed. Maybe McCarthy always was a short timer and it was just to sort of reset things so that the next guy would be in a great position. I don't know, but I do know that these are all possibilities that did not seem to be on the radar like 24 months ago. Yeah, and it was interesting because I had Charles Robinson on late last year and I said, Hey, any chatter that the Cowboys might move on from McCarthy after a year.

And his point was the reason Jerry keeps talking about how he wants to be next to McCarthy in a foxhole is because that kind of what you're talking about. They want to reset everything. They want to change everything. And even if McCarthy is some stabilizing force, they're okay with that if they move on in a couple of years. They just want to change things. Okay, so I'm curious, the defense is now 16th in points. It's not a small sample size, but it was 28th last year. I think a lot of the discussion, Bob, was the defense seems to be just good enough.

Let's, you know, just don't have it be the Mike Nolan disaster defense. And then you add in the pieces on that defense. One of that's O'Diizua, who I love, who I think had more pressures on Sunday than any DT last year. Michael Parsons looks amazing at multiple positions. Yes. Is this a legitimate NFC contender? Do you not put them on the list? with the Rams or, I mean, I don't know where we're putting the Cardinals here.

I guess we can get to that. But if you're looking, if you're just talking about legitimate NFC contenders, are you putting them on the top tier right now, Bob? Well, I think I am. I actually do believe that the Cowboys should be in the mix. And part of its circumstances, I mean, let's be honest, they play in the NFC East. And Hodd seemed pretty good that by about Thanksgiving,

they should probably have a playoff sports. spot pretty well sewn up. This is not a good division. Heck, it hasn't been a good division at several years, and the Cowboys haven't been able to capitalize on that, which is all the more maddening that you could basically have two to two and a half to maybe even three franchises, not even trying,

and you still were unable to beat them last year. But 2020 was quite a ride. But this year with Dak, with Tyrant Smith looking solid, with the influx of young defensive talent that really, really they badly needed and they badly needed a plan back there. I think they are following the recipe, which is top five offense and league average defense. And if you have that, you have the makings of an NFC contender. I don't know that there's an NFC team that is necessarily

head and shoulders above. I think Tampa Bay is clearly that team entering the season. But we do know that they are a team that has been able to stay pretty healthy until now. And obviously there's such things that are unprecedented like, you know, a 44-year-old quarterback. So I think the Packers have some real defensive concerns. I think the Rams are extremely top-heavy, which looks good in September. It doesn't always look good in December when the NFL attrition starts really hitting. So, you know, they're in the mix. They're in the mix and they have a very solid team and and they haven't had Demarcus Lawrence do anything yet.

And, you know, there's just, there's a lot to like here about where the Cowboys are right now. And, you know, like I said, to play Tampa like they did on opening night without Zach Martin, for instance, to then get a win out of Los Angeles with the Chargers and then come back and just, you know, just stop Philadelphia and Carolina in my opinion. Neither of those games were nearly as close as the final score indicated. They do seem like they're just starting to realize their power, and I think they're legit. You know Kyler Murray well. You helped launch his career.

I would say you could have 100% credit for that, Bob. So if anybody doesn't know, he was on a youth team when he was eight years old. It was sponsored by your Midday Radio show. But I want to ask on him and the Cardinals, because that's a discussion, I think, the people are having in Arizona right now, whether or not the Arizona Cardinals are on that list. What do you think about?

I mean, there's a lot of Texas connections where that's Kyle, whether that's Cliff or whomever. This Cardinals team, you think what of? Well, I just think Kyler just changes the math. And what's weird is, yeah, I do have connections to eight-year-old Kyler Murray, but at the same time, I have this very weird skepticism on when his powers are going to find, be neutralized because he keeps going up a level.

And now he's in the NFL. And as you know, even just watching Sunday's game against the Rams, it's third and it doesn't matter. And he still is going to figure out a way to get to the sticks. And it's impossible to play coverage and to basically spy him. And even if you do spy him, are you on a motorcycle? Because if you're just running, he's going to run past you. So, you know, I'm a huge believer in quarterback here's all. And the fact that he's near the top of the league and big time throws, and I do believe in that stat.

And also turnover worthy plays, he's down near the bottom. I mean, if he continues to play with this mental acuity of risk reward and understanding what's possible and what's not possible and then can do all that with his feet, they're a tough, tough out. Now, they're also in a ridiculous division. So I believe the Cardinals are as threatening as any team because they have four wins in the bank already. And that just changes the math to what they have to do on the way in. They're scary, man. And I was not convinced that Cliff Kingsbury is a good head coach.

No, I'm still not. Tyler might be so good he saves his job. That's right. That's exactly right. And it's a huge year for the Cardinals because if they do collapse again, they will probably change coach and GM, you would think. But, you know, for now, who wants to play them? And who wants to chase him around all night?

He's so remarkable. And I guess just like a 44-year-old quarterback, a 5-10 quarterback, you know, everything we know is wrong. It's amazing when you hear stories about eight-year-old Kyle Murray or high school Lamar Jackson. I'm talking to a high school coach in South Florida about Lamar. And he said that he literally, he played Lamar twice. And after the second time, he was like, I just don't have what it takes to be a high school coach. Like I schemed it perfectly and my schemes were wrong.

Yeah. And he had a crisis of confidence. He said, he looked himself in the mirror and said, am I really cut out for this? And then the next year, he sees Lamar do it to Florida State. he sees Lamar do it to anybody on his schedule. And then two years later, he sees it do, he sees him do it to the Bengals and the Dolphins. He says, oh, wait, I did just as well as those guys.

It's totally fine. So it's always funny to hear that when these guys keep leveling up and they're still just as good, give me an eight-year-old Kyla Murray scouting report. Because the funniest thing to me is, I think Chris Collins said this once, is the only way to know that you're going pro is if the other parents in the league complain,

you're allowed to play. And I think Kyler was probably one of those. guys. Oh, there's no doubt. And his dad, Kevin Murray, was his coach at the time of the seven and eight year old Louisville Vikings. And you could tell because his dad was the quarterback at A&M and his uncle was, I want to say, a utility outfielder in the big leagues for quite a while, like Calvin Murray, I think. And you could tell his dad was reluctant to do much with him because basically every time he took the ball, it's a touchdown. And so he's basically, he has a choice of annoying Kyler by not allowing him to play much or get the ball much or please pass it to this other kid

and so we stop beating everybody by 100 or, you know, annoy the entire public because this guy's a cheat code and you're winning games by 200 points. And so it was very clear to us, that basically it was load management NBA style for his eight-year-old son that I just can't give him the ball because he's too good. You know, that's one of my favorite things. And if I could ever give a suggestion to a sports empire media company, it would be just two stories about great pros when they were making all of us feel dumb. There's great tape on a huddle, which I know you're aware of probably. but if you go to Huddell and you find Miles Garrett in high school here in Arlington, Miles Garrett, there was a, you know, there was a tackle every week that had to try to pass protect against Miles Garrett in high school.

How do you think that went? You know, the game he had 10 sacks down here. Some poor dude like us is trying to pass protect against him. It's unbelievable. And even the guys, it's funny because my high school played against a bunch of guys. I'm from Orlando, but like Keith Rivers, who went to. to USC and was a first round pick. He played against my high school

and I had some friends of the offensive line and they were just like he was just, he blew past us every time maybe there was nothing we could do and he wasn't even like good in the NFL, you know? This is a good high school and it's just amazing. We talk about it so much where it's like the guys who are the 90th guy on the roster who get cut without a second

thought on August 15th, best player in the history of their high school. Best player in history of their town most of the time. Yes. Best player they ever knew you know, was them. You know, like imagine imagine how hard it is to come to grips with all of your magic tricks worked at every level and then you go to a place where all these guys know magic this is no fun i've pitched that idea about the highlights thing so the montreal canadians had the i went to a game there maybe i don't

like a decade ago and their intro video was really cool because it was all the first the oldest goal that all of their players had in youth hockey and you can hear the parents screaming and they but it was just they looked different. Like they looked different than everybody on the ice because now they play on the Montreal Canadiens. And it was just a very cool thing to say. It was just like, why isn't every team in every sport ripping this off? Why is when Dak Prescott walks onto the field?

Why am I not seeing nine-year-old Dak Prescott putting some random, some random kid in hell, you know, some random middle linebacker in hell when he's nine years old? That's what I want to say. I want to use the sports. Let's get this done. We can do this. We're giving free ideas. I know.

It edits us out then. Ozzy is going to steal this and finally make some money. Bob Sturm, thank you so much. We didn't even ask the Zeke Elliott question, which would have taken up 30 minutes of our time. I'm here anytime, man. Awesome, man. Thank you so much. Bob Sturm, he's at the athletic.

He's at the ticket. He is my go-to expert on the Dallas Cowboys. Thanks so much for joining us. My pleasure. Anytime. All right. Join now by the ringers Brian Curtis. Cowboys fan. So I brought you on the Cowboys episode.

A media writer, a football, aficionado, college football, college football head, I would say. Brian, in this industry, we get a lot of unsolicited emails from PR companies, just giving us odds we didn't ask for. And as we were warming up here, I got two. And I've gotten a lot more than that, but I got two in the last five minutes of odds for what Urban Meyer will be doing next year. Jacksonville Jaguar's head coach, not high on the list.

I'm curious. I was interested to see how far and where that video spread to over the weekend, just as far as it was a grainy cell phone video, and I didn't know how the mainstream media was going to react to it. They reacted to it by distributing it pretty quickly within about an hour. Everybody had seen it. I'm curious where you think the Urban Meyer story goes from here. So you hit on a really fascinating point.

this felt like an old deadspin story was now being enjoyed by all of us. It didn't have to have, you know, the two week long percolation on a website before, oh, we're going to touch it because can we get in here? Because, you know, Irby didn't fly with the team plane.

Is there a new, on team plane, is there a news angle in here? It just went straight to everybody immediately. I thought that was really interesting. And I don't say that in a decline of media scolding way. I'm just kind of like, oh, wow,

we're just, if that kind of video comes out, we're all talking about it immediately. And that's, that is on the whole, just in generalities, that's a good thing. We don't have to do the thing. The old newspaper rule used to be you couldn't report anything until somebody denied it, right? That was the whole thing. They had to have a press conference and they draw attention to it. They didn't have a press comments about it. Newspapers in the 80s just wouldn't report anything.

Like, I think the democratization of this, of all news, and this is obviously not specific to Arby-Meyer is generally a good thing. I'm curious, you know, we both love college football. And I think part of this story, and listen, this is a, a lot of it's a personal situation that I don't necessarily want to dig into as far as that goes. But I think this does speak, Urban Meyer getting up there and lying at first and saying, you know, people are trying to get into the dance for it. And the second video comes out and it shows that he wasn't being truthful, obviously. I think there's a cult of bullshit at the college level. And maybe the specific Derbemeyer, maybe it's not.

But I saw some college ball writers talk with this a couple days ago when this news first broke. But when you're a college coach, you don't really have to go through these motions. You don't have a lot of people questioning what you're doing. You can kind of get away with a lot as far as just making up a story. And I'm curious if you think there's anything to sort of the college to pro bullshit threshold. Yeah, it's part of it, though. I think it's probably more the, you know, smartphone age that Urban has wandered into.

Because I think this happened at Ohio State now, I think his press conference might have been different. By the way, congrats to the Jags writers for asking good questions. I thought I always make fun of sports writer questions. I thought those, I thought they were grilling him pretty well. But I think, you know, Larry Eustachy, people are pointing out, former basketball coach had this, maybe current basketball coach, had this happened back when he was doing it.

I'm not going to fly on the team playing. I'm going to go be doing things that I probably shouldn't be doing. So I guess there's a little bit of that at the college level, and that was a scandal at the time. But I just think it's a smartphone age. And by the way, Urban Meyer knows that. You know, he knows as soon as he's in public that people are going to be taking pictures. He looked like he was looking into the camera for some of those shots.

And, you know, we talk about this. I think he was looking towards the camera, but I don't think he saw a camera. I think he was just looking a million miles down. Just gazing, yeah, kind of into the middle distance. I always, we say this on the press box a lot whenever there's a journalism scandal. Sometimes people are telling you they don't want to do a job. And it's up to us to listen to them. You know, some journalist has a horrible conflict of interest that they know is a conflict of interest.

And you're like, I hear you. You don't want to be in journalism anymore. And I think we should just listen to Urban Meyer and Shod Khan should listen to Urban Meyer. and say, you don't want to be the coach of the Jaguars. You don't want this job. Let's not do it then. It's really funny because I think that Urban Meyer trying to be culture guy at the NFL level was such a terrible idea.

This is a guy who disappointed me because I thought he was going to be able to build an offense around Trevor Lawrence that was at least going to get them a couple wins better than they should be. I mean, this is a guy who even though he's not a play caller, built with Dan Mullen, some of the most innovative offenses in college for over a decade. And then he just got nothing for us at the NFL.

And I kind of feel like he became a, I was in an Orson, well, I was a couple months ago, and he's talking about a concept called shut eye. And it's where a psychic just lies so much that then they start to believe their own readings. And they're just all in on their readings. Like, I know, this is it. and then just becomes a feedback loop.

I kind of feel like Urban kept saying he was a culture coach, not a scheme coach until he believed it, and he just didn't have any schemes. And the last thing I want to ask you, before we get to this Cowboys thing, is do you think that this is going to have a chilling effect on the college to pro pipeline, or do you think that if Matt Campbell's ready,

somebody's going to take them? It probably will, but I'm not sure that it should. Because I think somebody like Matt Campbell, if he decides to go, the pros will probably want to be a pro coach. Matt Ruhle probably wants to be a pro coach. And we can argue, and I think have a pretty good argument about whether Urban, even if he'd been all in, would have succeeded with the Jaguars,

given that Urban's interest in anything is probably four to five years and would he had enough time to turn it around, get the guys he wanted in there and actually win games. I'm not sure that he would have. But again, he doesn't want the job. He didn't want a bunch of college jobs before this. And by the way, I thought Mike Finger calmed us down at San Diego. Antonio made a great point.

He said, don't you love the Schadenfreude from all the college football fans who wanted Urban to be their college coach one year ago? Yes. And are now celebrating his downfall. Miami message boards won him in Coral Gables yesterday. Oh, we still want him. Okay. So they're still in. I saw like nine photoshopps yesterday on Miami message boards of him wearing a turnover chain.

No need to travel on the team playing. We can make some accommodations here at the U. I love it. You can live in Dublin, Ohio, if you want. Just recruit guys. All right. So we're doing a Cowboys thing. We did 30 solid minutes with Bob Sturm.

He's amazing. I'm going to ask you this from a fan perspective. Bob has a different perspective than you. But is this Cowboys team different, Brian Curtis? They seem smarter as an organization than they have in a long. time. You know, you and I, since 2016, when they drafted Dak Prescott, Cowboys have had a lot of good players. As you've written many times, talked about many times, they have never had the feel of organizational intelligence. We're going to resign the right players. We're going to pay them the right

amount of money. In Dax case, we're going to resign them at the right time. We're going to put them in positions to win on the field, hire the right assistant coaches. Now you look at it, and I don't think this is an organizational change. I think this is kind of an accident. But, But you're like, oh, the Cowboys have decided to, you know, first of all, let me just give you a couple examples. One is the Jalen Smith thing, which is really interesting happening right in the middle of the season. The other thing is Cowboys had, I think, 11 draft picks this year. There were a lot of people like me saying, can't you package some of those and go up in the top of the second round and get studs? And essentially what they said is, nope, we're going to make all these draft picks.

And we're going to sit there and take them on. Look, what happened? Guys like Osa Digizua playing really well on D. defense. They went to the numbers theory of drafting, which you have been writing about for like five or ten years now. The Cowboys belatedly kind of figured it out. And now you look at the defense, like, maybe it's not great, but it's game. And it's because they have a lot of depth. What's the Jerry part of this? I mean, you know, Bob and I were talking about the McCarthy undoing the Garrett era, but Jerry's still there. And I think part of Jerry liked the Garrett era, because it was

also the Jerry era. And I'm curious how you think knowing Jerry better than a lot of people, how this plays in when it's a really good team. It's going to be able to sit back. Is he going to try to sign guys he likes the huge extensions? How does this go? Such a good question, because I think the sun setting of Jerry has been a topic among cowboy fandom and Dallas media now for five years. And whenever something happens like Jalen Smith, people go, oh, it's Stephen Jones is now in charge of the team. This means that Stephen is now pulling the Because Jerry loved Jalen Smith. He gave him a ton of money.

He loved his story. He thought of him, you know, as much as a just inspiring figure as a linebacker. Okay. But in all that is this idea that Jerry Jones can just come back at any time. He is not like signed a form that says, now Stephen Jones will run. So I think you'll see you'll see appearances of Jerry. But honestly, at this point, like midway through a season, I think what he wants to do is talk outside the locker room after a game to reporters and talk about how proud he is of the team and that

they won. And he will be happy with that. Question digs being out of the game. Sure. And he'll give you a quote. He will undermine the hell out of Mike McCarthy. Remember, he's the guy who told the world that Zach Martin wasn't going to move to tackle and Terrence Steele was going to start there before the coach did. And the coach had that horrible press conference. Well, we're looking at everything. I don't know. Well, the owner just told us. So, so yes, he will undermine. he'll give those interviews, but I think for the next 13 weeks, he'll probably just be pretty happy as long as they win. You never know. By the way, this is from Urban Myers Press Congress happening right now. Urban Meyer on why he didn't fly back home on the Jaguars plane.

I thought at the time it was a chance for everybody to clear their head, including myself. So it was kind of a mental health break for Herb to see the grandkids and all that stuff. Yeah. I don't know. I'm not sure that worked. Last question. As a Cowboys fan, you're a legitimate expectations for the Dallas Cowboys. So they've been, I think the Cowboys defining characteristic of the last five years is inconsistency, year to year, week to week, right? Again, they've won big games. They've played big games. They've had good seasons.

But the thing I'm sort of interested in is can they play like this week in and week out all year? And I think, first of all I look at the NFCs, I expect them to win the NFCs. And I expect it to be a really good playoff team. And I think right now they have the look of really tough out in the playoffs that could be something more. That's probably my expectation. Wow. Really tough out in the play. They're banging on pots and pans in Dallas.

It's Cowboys fandom. Now, of course, yeah, in Dallas, that translates to, you know, presidential election style fervor. Because the Cowboys have a pulse. It's like the Cowboys are exciting. They're running away with the NFC East because nobody else is capable of winning two games in a row. Mm-mm. Mm-mm. Wow.

Brian Curtis, the Press Box podcast. What do you got for us this week, bud? Oh, man. We're still coming together on the Friday press box. So stay tuned for that, putting some stuff together. But I think it's going to be a very fun show. Jim Nance was an electric factory on Solner's Day, which is really surprising to me. No, I've never gotten, Corey McConnell, if anybody hasn't seen it,

Corey McConnell, our producer put together a trailer of Jim talking about how to wear a quarter zip, his personal preferences on quarter zips. And it has gotten more, and this says as much about the NFL as anything. I've gotten more texts from NFL people over the past 12 hours reacting to the quarter zip content than anything I've ever like you could unless you individually rip a guy

unless you like unless a GM or assistant GM or coach thinks you've been unfair to them they very rarely reach out to any point that you make when you talk about quarters tips with Jim Vance and you're getting you're getting a long text message this goes back to something we've seen with magazine stories with athletes you know how you get a magazine story in GQ and the athlete doesn't want to talk about sports

but they just want to talk about fashion. It turns out Jim Nance is the same. Broadcasting, I'll give you a little bit. Quarter Zip, I'm all in. Let's talk. He's amazing. He's amazing. Brian Curtis is also amazing. Pressbox podcast, reademothranger.com.

Thanks so much, buddy. Thanks, Kevin. All right. Thank you to Bob and Brian for for joining. Hope we answered the question about whether or not the Cowboys are actual contenders. All right, thanks to Bob and Brian for joining us. Hope we answer the question of whether the Cowboys can actually contend for a Super Bowl. This episode brought to you by production help by Stefan Anderson and Arjuna Ramkopol.

Next up on this feed, Nora and Mallory will take it through all the storylines. The NFL. Slow Newsday with Jim Nance should be up at the time of his posts. This has been The Ringer NFL show on the Ringer Podcast Network.