The Cowboys hammered the Eagles to death last year. 3 times last season. To add insult to injury, the last two losses ended the regular season and the post season. After that, and with Vick and Kolb as QBs of the future, Howie Roseman and Andy Reid decided to fully revamp a team that two years prior had been to the NFC Championship game.

Those weren’t just losses. They were two crushing statements that something was deeply wrong with this team.

The Cowboys jumped on top in both games, and the Eagles didn’t fight back. They couldn’t fight back.

So Eagles head coach and soon-to-be General Manager Howie Roseman tore apart the roster.

Yeah, they dumped McNabb. But they also either traded or released ineffective or disinterested veterans like Darren Howard, Jason Babin, Will Witherspoon, Chris Clemons, Sean Jones, Kevin Curtis, Chris Gocong and Reggie Brown.

They cut ties with Brian Westbrook, Jeremiah Trotter and Sheldon Brown – three of the team’s best players of the past generation.

They got rid of half the team. Some 29 players who spent time on the roster last year are no longer with the organization – 13 of them were starters at some point in 2009.

via Debacles in Dallas changed Eagles’ course.

Michael Vick is having his best regular season ever so far. McCoy is on his way to a very impressive year. D Jax and Maclin have become a prolific receiving tandem and may both break 1000 yards this year. The defense in some situations has been tops, but awful in the Eagles red zone, especially without Asante Samuel (who will miss his third game in a row this Sunday). The offensive line has been solid, but starting right tackle Winston Justice will be replaced by reserve tackle King Dunlap. Overall, the Eagles are a team no one will not get amped to play and the Cowboys are a team who is currently playing above their record.

The last place Cowboys have plagued by injuries have suffered more from a general lack of discipline that may have been remedied with the ascendancy of interim head coach Jason Garrett. There is no better way to start off the last stretch of the regular season than Eagles beating the Cowboys.

If the Eagles beat the Cowboys, they will have defeated every division opponent at least once and will take control of the race to the NFC East division title and there will be much less apprehension in Philadelphia as people will begin to wonder how far the Eagles can go in the playoffs. If the Eagles lose a fourth game in a row to the Cowboys, then most fans will wonder what else needs to change to get the team back on track.

“We had a president that couldn’t get there on time a lot, Bill Clinton,” Jerry said, addressing Dez Bryant’s punctuality problems in bizarre fashion. “Seriously.

“But boy, when he got there, he brought the wood.”

via Jerry’s bizarre Clinton-Bryant comparison – Dallas Cowboys Blog – ESPN Dallas.

I hate that the Cowboys have Bryant. With Jasen Witten, Miles Austin, Patrick Crayton and now Bryant, I don’t count Roy Williams…he is bad by choice, they have 4 big play-making receivers that are just physically imposing. They will be tough for Eagles to defend. Couple that with a backfield with Felix Jones, Tashard Choice and Marion Barber its just a lot of weapons for a defensive coordinator to scheme against.

The fans were livid. Not only do they want their team to take a shot at being the team that goes 20-0 and by extension a team that becomes the best of all time, if they had tickets for schedule weeks 16 or 17, they got to see Painter instead of Manning. They only have to look at the Patriots, who played starters until Wes Welker blew out his knee and Tom Brady’s go to safety valve WR went from being a guy with league leading 123 receptions to  a capable rookie Julian Edelman. I am sure Patriots coach Bill Belichick would have rather had Welker and Edelman to help out Brady and Randy Moss going into this weekends AFC divisional round.

I was in New York the Tuesday (Dec. 28th I believe) after Welker went down for 6 months, and after the Jets had played the Colts’ backups for one of two wins they needed to get to the playoffs and  a cabbie was tuned in to sports talk radio as I rode in a taxi from Penn Station to the East Side. The hosts were calling the Jets illegitimate and though the hosts could be wrong, the point was made that the Jets were being man handled by the Colts before Peyton Manning was benched. All of this, along with many other Week 17 duds, left NFL commissioner Goodell with a bad taste in his mouth.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is thinking about creating a special incentive for teams to play their starters in every  game of the year even if the last few games of the season cannot change the playoff picture for this team. While NFL starters clamor to not play in pre-season games, are pulled during “garbage time” and an injured starter can be the difference between a team being a playoff contender and missing the playoffs completely (see Brady, McNabb and Palmer season ending knee injuries), he wants to find an incentive to make playoff teams play players in meaningless regular season finales. I doubt he can offer enough money and or resources to make it worth the teams’ or players’ sacrifice. The goal of the regular season is to make the playoffs and the goal of the playoffs is to make the Super Bowl. There is nothing Goodell can do that would be fair and enough to motivate teams to go all out in garbage time.

A quick and dirty way to attempt to create a more meaningful last two weeks of the season matter is to make the last two weeks “rivalry weeks” or only intra-division play. So a typical NFC EAST end of season would be:

• Week 16: Redskins at Eagles, Cowboys at Giants
• Week 17: Giants at Redskins, Eagles at Cowboys

As of week 16, 3 of those teams were in the running for a playoff spot, and I believe all three had to win out for the divisional crown. As it turned out in Week 17, the Eagles could have been 2nd or 6th seed in the NFC, the Cowboys could have been 3rd or 6th. We know how that turned out. It may not have changed the Colts situation, but it may created more meaningful match ups in week 17.

The second reason I think divisional play is good at the end of a season, is that misery loves company. The Browns were the loss that took the Steelers playoff destiny completely out of their own hands. Browns WR/KR/Wildcat QB Josh Cribbs was interviewed after the game and intimated that even though the Browns had a bad record, beating the arch rival Steelers was the next best thing to going to the playoffs for his fans.

Another reason Goodell may be especially pissed is that this makes his plan to extend the regular season look especially stupid. Welker and Charles Grant, a dominating defensive end for the NFC 1st seed New Orleans Saints, went down in meaningless football games in week 17. One less game and both of these teams have these players for the 2009-10 playoffs. One more game tacked on to a long brutal season, who else would have been hurt in a game that didn’t matter?

I tried to explain to the guy that the Cowboys didn’t come up with the name. It was the creation of Bob Ryan, an NFL Films senior producer, who used it as the title for one of the Dallas highlight films. Of course, Tex Schramm, the team president, was quick to embrace it, and like everything else about the Cowboys, it raised the ire of Philadelphia.

Most Eagles fans just accept the Dallas rivalry as part of their Philadelphia birthright. They assume the Cowboys have always been Public Enemy No. 1 around here, but that isn’t so. Older fans remember that in the ‘50s, the Eagles’ rival was the New York Giants and that was true for most of the ‘60s as well.

The Cowboys didn’t join the NFL until 1960 and they were such a pitiful bunch for the first six years, it was hard to take them seriously. The Eagles won eight of the first 10 games in the series and no one thought much about it.

But in 1966, the Cowboys got good, and they started strutting right away. They routed the Eagles 56-7 in the Cotton Bowl, and they were still throwing the ball to run up the score late in the fourth quarter. The Eagles were angry and they got a measure of revenge with a bizarre 24-23 win at Franklin Field three weeks later.

via Eagles and Cowboys Meet for 100th Time Sunday.

For me its Giants, Skins and then Cowboys. Why? Most Cowboys fans I know, (all except one) have never gone to a Cowboys’ game in Dallas and grew up in the north east. They are fakers in my view. They are ripe for ridicule. I grew up around more Giants and ‘Skins fans more than anything so I always had an object for my ire.

But I will hate the Cowboys enough this weekend.

It was Thanksgiving Day in Dallas, but Luis Zendejas wasn’t in the mood to celebrate. The game ended and Zendejas, the Cowboys’ kicker, walked towards the Eagles’ bench. He was looking for Buddy Ryan.

“I wanted to deck him,” Zendejas said. “If I could’ve found him, I would have. He’s the biggest S.O.B. in the league.”

The date was Nov. 24, 1989. The Eagles crushed the Cowboys, 27-0, but that wasn’t the big story. The real headline was Zendejas’ claim that Ryan put a $200 bounty on his head. A bounty? On a kicker? What?

Zendejas swore it was true. He said before the game that Eagles special teams coach Al Roberts warned him that Ryan posted a cash reward for any player who could knock Zendejas out of the game. When Zendejas kicked off to start the second half, rookie linebacker Jessie Small leveled him a full 20 yards away from the play.

The 5-foot-9, 170-pound Zendejas was knocked silly by the 6-foot-3, 240-pound Small. The kicker staggered to his feet and shouted a few words in the direction of the Eagles’ bench before he was helped from the field.

via Didinger’s Game I’ll Never Forget: The Bounty Bowl.

Zendejas should have known Buddy Ryan was watching him from his star turn in “Buddy’s Watching You”:

Twenty-eight-year-old Damian Alexander of Cordova was acquitted Wednesday of attempted murder but was convicted of first- and second-degree assault and reckless endangerment.

Authorities say Alexander fired between two and five rounds from a shotgun at an SUV that was driving away from his home on the evening of Dec. 28. Two people were wounded. Prosecutors say Alexander had arranged for a fist fight with a man in the vehicle but brought a gun instead.

The people in the vehicle had been exchanging taunting text messages and phone calls with Alexander about that day’s game between the Eagles and Cowboys. Philadelphia won, 44-6, knocking Dallas out of the NFL playoffs.

via Man convicted in fight between Cowboys and Eagles fans : Corpus Christi National | Caller-Times | .