IRVING, Texas - Make the finishing touches on your parade floats - on Friday the Cowboys are set to play Houston in the NFL preseason version of the Rose Bowl.
There are a million ways to describe the NFL preseason, and most of them are synonyms for "irrelevant," but the third game of a team's exhibition slate is when the lights really come on. If those first two are just to get the timing down, and so many of the starters will sit in game four, this one - the dress rehearsal, they call it - is the biggie.
Win the dress rehearsal and it's smooth sailing to Tampa, boys. Super Bowl XLIII here we come. This is the game where legends are made, dreams are shattered, stars are born and fortunes are lost. Hey third-string quarterback Richard Bartel, your Cowboys just won the dress rehearsal game! You're going to Disney World, right?
OK, so maybe not. Friday's game, slated for a 7 p.m. (CDT) kickoff, is in the grand scheme of things, still pretty worthless in determining how the 2008 Dallas Cowboys will be remembered. It's just a preseason game - evidenced by last year's 28-16 dress rehearsal loss to the Texans, from which the Cowboys somehow managed to rebound to win 13 regular season games.
Last year the Cowboys lost the preseason finale, too, finishing silly season at 2-2. The three Cowboys Super Bowl teams in the 1990s combined for a 5-9-1 record in preseason games.
In 1971, the team's first championship season, the Cowboys were a perfect 6-0 in games that don't count. They even avenged the previous year's Super Bowl loss, beating Baltimore 27-14 in front of 22,291 ravenous Colts fans. Just to put that in perspective - more people witnessed the Cowboys' Wednesday night practice at Texas Stadium.
The moral of this story is everything we hear about the preseason is true. It's really no barometer on how well a team will fare once the bullets start flying for real. So while the Cowboys haven't looked great in jumping out to this 0-2 preseason record, there is a silver lining out there, somewhere.
"The good news is we do have two more preseason games left to polish this thing up," Cowboys nose tackle Tank Johnson said. "And luckily, we're not 0-2 in the regular season and we're not behind the 8-ball in that respect. We definitely have a fresh start coming up here in week one."
Johnson will concede the dress rehearsal game is the one most like a regular season contest in the way the Cowboys will prepare for the game. They'll watch film on the Texans, just not as much of it as they would, say, a month from now. The offense will do things they think will be particularly effective against Houston, but it's not like they're creating new plays or formations. Even though it's still a preseason game, Johnson said he was excited to take a regular season approach.
"I'm looking forward to game-planning this week," he said. "It's vanilla in the way we prepare, but it's like what we do in the regular season. It's not as in-depth as we would go into a regular season game, but it kind of gives us the idea of what we're going to be up against, maybe the kind of players and the plays they run."
Cowboys head coach Wade Phillips said this game is different than the others. While he's stated before that the Cowboys first objective in every preseason game is to win, they haven't made putting their guys in position to do so the top priority these last two weeks.
He said not only does the way the team spends the week leading up to this game change, but so too does the way the coaches evaluate the performance.
"I think us just playing together more," Phillips stressed. "The same things you want to see out of preseason - to see if individuals are progressing and if team-wise we're progressing. More team-wise this game than the other games.
"We worked a lot of plays we're going to utilize the whole season during preseason. Now we're going to be more specific this game and say 'Hey, we're going to run these plays.' Before we said we're going to run every play, and then we wanted to look at a lot of different ones. Now we're saying "Hey, we're going to look at these specific ones.'"
The different approach comes with a change in the lineup. Adam "Pacman" Jones will start at left cornerback after rookie Mike Jenkins was there the first two games, working in place of the injured Terence Newman. Phillips said Jones would get more of a chance to showcase his punt returning skills. Jones rebounded from a poor game in the preseason opener to have a nice showing in game two against Denver, tying for a team-high six tackles. If Jones stays true to form, he'll relish every chance to guard Houston's best playmaker, Pro-Bowl receiver Andre Johnson.
"Whoever comes up there, I'm ready to compete," Jones said.
Offensively, Houston will look quite similar to Denver. Before taking over the Texans in 2006, head coach Gary Kubiak spent 11 years coaching offense for the Broncos. That could be a good or a bad thing for the Cowboys, who just played the Broncos and their zone-blocking offense. Despite having the opportunity to practice against Denver's style of attack four times in two days, the Cowboys starting defense allowed touchdowns on the first two Broncos drives.
The team's first-string defenders also gave up a touchdown to the Chargers, working just about a quarter in the opener against San Diego. So they realize there's plenty of room for improvement.
"I think it's probably the last game our starters and main players are going to get a lot of time," Johnson said. "It makes us want to put some good stuff on film before we shut it down for the preseason. We want to show that we can be consistent in what we do and do it at a high level. Once we can put that on film, I think we can kind of be more at-ease mentally going into the season."
The Cowboys offense will get to go against a youthful Texans defensive unit. And what do the Cowboys' rookies think about Houston after their first chance to really study a defense at the NFL level?
"Fast," said running back Tashard Choice, set to make his Texas Stadium debut. "They get to the ball. They play hard and make plays. (Mario Williams) is a great player, somebody you're going to have to pay a lot of attention to on every play. All of them. (Defensive tackle Amobi) Okoye is really good, too. He's going to be awesome."
For so many of the Cowboys rookies, Friday will mark the first time a Texas Stadium crowd has seen them in live action, and as Choice will tell you, that's almost as neat as finally adopting the regular season routine.
"It's going to be fun - I can't wait," Choice said. "The first impression is everything for the fans to see you, here. They saw the first two games, but to actually show yourself in person in Dallas is going to be big. This one here's a little different."
Johnson agrees. "I think this game is very important for us, and it definitely is a dress rehearsal with respect to our routine and just trying to get a feel for what we want to do this season," he said.
True, Friday's outcome won't matter much in the grand scheme of things, but it's as close as we've been to a football game of consequence since February. It's the biggest of the smallest.
Call it the Dress Rehearsal Bowl - the granddaddy of them all.
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