It is important to have a spectrum of sorts. We all have hopes, wants, wishes, dreams, ambitions, you name it. There are ways that we’d all like to see this upcoming Dallas Cowboys season go. In a perfect world, stop me if you have heard this before, this would be the one that finally delivers the ring, the one ring to rule them all, to Mordor.
You never know, though. Seasons can go a number of different ways because they are built upon a number of different things, including a number of different players. There are always a wide range of outcomes for these sorts of things and today we want to focus on the player portion of it all.
Donovan Ezeiruaku
It feels fair to say that there is a world where Donovan Ezeiruaku is the best pass rusher on the Dallas Cowboys. Heck, maybe there is a world where he is a top 10 pass rusher.
Ezeiruaku stormed on the scene in training camp last year, but obviously everything about the Cowboys defense (and the Parsons trade) broke the second the regular season actually started. On some level we can give people like Ezeiruaku a mulligan for their involvement.
That is no longer the case. The defense has been outfitted very differently and there is as strong of a presence along the interior as there ever has been by way of Quinnen Williams. No one is expecting Ezeiruaku to be anything specific, but he has to live up to his second-round billing.
And he could! That feels probable, actually. But when you say things like “second-round pick” and “Dallas Cowboys” you have wounds from the past that make you wonder if it is worth just never actually selecting anyone there again.
It would be a real bitter pill to swallow if he was unable to take that step and if he was just another second-round miss from the team. This season is going to tell us a lot which of them it really is.