Rebuilding team or playoff contender, which will the Dallas Cowboys be this season?
 
Well, the franchise’s all-time leader in passing yards thinks it will be the latter. However, Hall of Fame quarterback Troy Aikman added that if there isn’t success this season, it might be time to go in another direction.
 
“I just sense that this is kind of a watershed year for the Cowboys,” Aikman said during a recent luncheon at a Dallas hotel. “It’s a group that’s been together for a while, and I just don’t know that you can plan on keeping this core together, which they’ve been able to do.
 
“I just think this is an extremely important year. If they don’t do it this year, I think it’s going to be hard for them to move forward.”
 
Aikman, who played with current Cowboys coach Jason Garrett from 1993-99, endorsed naming Garrett the team’s head coach last season. Up to this point, nothing has changed Aikman’s mind.
 
The FOX NFL television analyst went in great depth about Garrett’s note-taking and studying as a player, comparing Garrett’s playing days to an internship for his time as an NFL head coach.
 
But Aikman also said that Garrett might have “sold society short” by becoming a football coach, adding that Garrett is the one person he knows that could run for president.   
 
“I don’t know a finer person than Jason Garrett,” Aikman said. “I know a lot of other people that I would put in his class, but I wouldn’t put anybody ahead of him.”
 

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Sensabaugh’s return was sort of a consolation prize, both for him and for Dallas.

The Cowboys sorely needed to improve the back end of their defense, but team owner Jerry Jones didn’t want to spend as much as the top safeties available were getting. He tried helping the secondary by pursuing cornerback Nnamdi Asomugha, then eventually worked his way to safety Abram Elam. Still needing a second safety, Jones turned to Sensabaugh.

Sensabaugh was available because he couldn’t get any of those whopper deals that were going around. He accepted a one-year contract in hopes of getting a longer, more-lucrative deal from Dallas or trying again as a free agent next summer.

He’s off to a good start.

Facing San Diego in the second preseason game, Sensabaugh got tough and wedged his helmet into the belly of running back Mike Tolbert to force a fumble, then made an athletic move to intercept a pass. It was erased because the back of his heel landed out of bounds, but Cowboys coaches considered it good enough to call it a game for the first team after that play.

On Saturday night, in Minnesota, Sensabaugh was involved in three big plays — one bad, two good.

“I guess I was plus-one for the day,” he said, smiling. “I had to do something to make up for the big touchdown.”

Sensabaugh hopes to be more of a ball-hawker this season.

Coach Rob Ryan’s defense is all about forcing pressure up front, which could make for more wayward passes. Sensabaugh had a career-high five interceptions last year, with four coming over the last six games.

Sensabaugh played strong safety last year, which meant he covered tight ends. Ryan’s scheme basically has two free safeties, so it will be up to Sensabaugh and Elam to figure out the coverages. It helps that Elam played for Ryan in Cleveland the last two years, so he’s more familiar with the role.

“I’m learning his play style and he’s learning mine,” Sensabaugh said. “You get to help out on whoever you want, kind of. You just read the quarterback. If he’s looking one way, I have the freedom to just go that way, as opposed to strong safety, where if you’re man up on a guy you have to stay on your man until the play is over. It frees you up to make more plays I guess. I’m getting used to it. It’s fun.”

Cowboys coach Jason Garrett stresses winning the turnover battle as much as any statistic, and Dallas’ defense didn’t have a single takeaway the first two games. (San Diego recovered Tolbert’s fumble.) So Sensabaugh’s pickoff against the Vikings was a bit of a breakthrough for Ryan’s group, and the blocked field goal turned out even better because Alan Ball returned it for a touchdown.

Which was more fun?

Sensabaugh leaned toward the blocked kick because of the momentum swing — from the opponent possibly scoring points to his team getting a touchdown.

“I started my career on special teams, and I always feel it’s real important to make a big play,” he said. “So I always try to stress going really hard on special teams whenever I get an opportunity.”

Sensabaugh’s career began in Jacksonville, where his special teams coordinator was Joe DeCamillis. Joe D, as he’s known, is now Dallas’ special teams coordinator.

DeCamillis has used Sensabaugh as a bunny-hopping kick blocker before and decided to break out that play again after seeing on tape that the Vikings’ front line tended to drop low to fight off blockers.

With Jay Ratliff and Igor Olshansky making sure those Minnesota linemen stayed down, Sensabaugh made his move. He jumped over the pile of bodies, then quickly jumped up and out to get his hands on the kick.

“It’s just about how quick you can get up and get down,” Sensabaugh said. “You’re not really jumping as high as you can (the first time), you’re just trying to jump high enough to get over those guys. But you want to get your feet down so you can get the second jump to block the field goal. It’s like a double-jump.”

The bad news is that by having shown this trick, teams aren’t likely to let the Cowboys pull it on them. Even the Vikings figured out how to stop it.

“I tried it a second time and got flipped,” Sensabaugh said. “I about broke my neck. I guess they knew it was coming.”

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

I love the folks who cover the Dallas Cowboys, because they’re all so grouchy about the team. The Cowboys beat remains one of the last great bastions of skepticism in modern sports journalism. You talk to the people who spend their days around the team and you would think there wasn’t one decent player on the roster except maybe DeMarcus Ware, and he needs to speak up more. I think it’s the way teams should be covered — relentless doubt and constant questioning of everything the newsmakers are saying. I’ve long believed that the beat writers who cover a team, since they examine it so closely every day and see all of the warts and flaws, should be the last ones to admit the team is any good.

Jean-Jacques Taylor is not a beat writer. He’s the excellent new columnist for ESPNDallas.com. But he’s been covering the Cowboys for a very long time, and I don’t imagine he’ll mind me lumping him in here. Especially in light of the column he has up right now, which says the Cowboys are in “full-fledged rebuilding mode just like the Buffalo Bills and Cleveland Browns.” Jacques considers this a good thing, by the way, since it indicates that Jason Garrett is talking sense to Jerry Jones, but he believes it’s going to have a seriously adverse effect on the team’s chances this season:

No team with championship aspirations enters a season with essentially three rookies in its offensive line.

The Cowboys, as currently constructed, will win six to eight games.

And that’s OK because instead of chasing fool’s gold, Garrett is actually building a foundation for the future.

For years, Jerry Jones has convinced himself that his Cowboys were a couple of key players away from winning another title when that’s never really been the case. It’s certainly not true this season.

If we’re honest, Green Bay, New Orleans, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Chicago are all much better than Dallas.

The New York Giants are slightly better, and none of us will be surprised if St. Louis, Detroit and, maybe, Minnesota surpass the Cowboys by the end of the season.

Finally, someone has convinced Jerry his team isn’t nearly as talented as he thinks.

All due respect to Jacques, nobody’s “much better” than anybody in the NFL. And I will be surprised if St. Louis, Detroit and Minnesota turn out to be any better than Dallas. I know everybody’s got the Rams and Lions down for sleepers, but I need to see it first. The talent on those rosters isn’t nearly as proven as the talent on Dallas’ roster, and there are more (and more glaring) holes. Minnesota is on the way down, and Donovan McNabb isn’t going to be the answer. And as for the other teams on Jacques’ list, the Falcons and Bears look like prime regression candidates to me, and it’s not as though the Giants are without their own problems.

A team that has Ware, Tony Romo, Miles Austin, Dez Bryant, Jason Witten, Felix Jones, Jay Ratliff, Anthony Spencer and Mike Jenkins on its roster has no reason to consider itself a “rebuilding” team on the order of a Buffalo or Cleveland. Most of the analysis of the Cowboys as they come off a 6-10 season ignores the number of very good players they still have on their roster and locks in on the fact that the 2010 team fell so far short of expectations. All the defense has to do, under a new coordinator and with many of the same players that rampaged through the final months of 2009, is to move up from the very back to the middle of the pack in order to give the very good offense a chance to win games.

As for the offensive line, all we heard out of Dallas last year was how bad the offensive line was. So they make sweeping changes and now we’re supposed to believe it’s going to be worse? Sure, starting two rookies and a second-year guy is the kind of thing that sounds alarm bells. But it’s not as though Tyron Smith, Bill Nagy and Phil Costa are replacing Russ Grimm, Jackie Slater and Anthony Munoz. There’s a chance, given a little time together, they could be better on the line than they were last year. They can’t be much worse. The Cowboys scored plenty of points last year behind the old line and with Romo on the shelf for the second half.

In the end, I guess my point is that there’s a lot of room in the NFL between “rebuilding” and “Super Bowl champion,” and I think the Cowboys right now rest in that space. I think they have a pretty good seat up near the front, too.

It’s easy to look at the team you see every day and get caught up in the flaws, but every team has flaws. Six teams will make the playoffs from the NFC, and they won’t all be great. Some of them will just be pretty good. Heck, last year, one was downright lousy, and it knocked off the defending champs in the first round.

This isn’t a league in which a handful of teams contend and the rest don’t. This is a league with ample middle ground from which some teams rise to great heights and others tumble. It happens every year, and we never know which teams will rise from the middle and which will fall. The Cowboys can be wisely future-focused and at the same time contend in 2011. These things are not mutually exclusive. It doesn’t all have to be one extreme or the other — not even with the Cowboys. I don’t think they’ll win their division and coast into the playoffs without a care, but I think they have enough very good players to make them a contender if they stay healthy and things break their way. The NFL has a lot of teams like that, and there’s nothing wrong with being one of them.

IRVING — Andre Gurode was warned, just like everyone else on the
Dallas Cowboys. Under first-year coach Jason Garrett, jobs will be
won and lost based on how players perform in camp and preseason
games, not by what they’ve done in the past.

Having made the Pro Bowl the past five years wasn’t enough for
Gurode to keep his roster spot.

The Cowboys cut the veteran center Monday for a variety of
reasons including his age and salary, his decision to have knee
surgery so late in the offseason that it sidelined him for the
start of camp and by the performance by an undrafted, unproven
second-year player in Gurode’s absence.

“What we’ve said right from Day 1 is it doesn’t really matter
where you came from or what you’ve done in the past,” Garrett said.
“We’re going to try our best as coaches and evaluators to see what
you’re doing right now and see what you can do for us going
forward. We try to do that individually, we try to do that
collectively. We’re not in the business of trying to send a message
to the rest of the team. We’re trying to make the best decision for
our team.”

Still, the decision/message was clear to everyone, from veterans
who may feel comfortable to rookie free agents still trying to
prove themselves.

“That’s the way it should be,” veteran linebacker Keith Brooking
said. “I think when you can create that environment and that
message is sent throughout your team – and it’s not just a message,
there are examples that run through the team – I think that’s a
really good thing for everyone. That’s what pushes you, that’s what
makes you better. “

The Cowboys already had cut several other high-priced veterans,
including linemen Marc Colombo and Leonard Davis. By adding Gurode
to the list, Tony Romo’s blockers will include three inexperienced
linemen: Phil Costa at center, top pick Tyron Smith at right tackle
and seventh-rounder Bill Nagy at left guard.

Costa is the guy whose strong play pushed Gurode out the
door.

A hard worker as a rookie last year, he played in four games and
started once. He became the first-team center at the start of camp
because Gurode was on the physically unable to perform list.

Gurode got a chance to reclaim the job once he was healthy,
moving straight to the first team. But the Cowboys decided he
wasn’t so much better than Costa that he was worth keeping,not when
they could also save $5.5 million against the salary cap by cutting
Gurode.

They liked the idea of finding out what they might have in a
24-year-old instead of relying on a 32-year-old coming off knee
surgery.

© 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

By Jaime Aron

ASSOCIATED PRESS

IRVING — Andre Gurode was warned, just like everyone else on the Dallas Cowboys. Under first-year coach Jason Garrett, jobs will be won and lost based on how players perform in camp and preseason games, not by what they’ve done in the past.

Having made the Pro Bowl the last five years wasn’t enough for Gurode to keep his roster spot. The Cowboys cut the veteran center Monday for a variety of reasons that included his age and salary, his decision to have knee surgery so late in the offseason that it sidelined him for the start of camp, and the performance by an undrafted, unproven second-year player in Gurode’s absence.

“What we’ve said right from Day 1 is it doesn’t really matter where you came from or what you’ve done in the past,” Garrett said. “We’re going to try our best as coaches and evaluators to see what you’re doing right now and see what you can do for us going forward.”

The message was clear to everyone, from veterans who may feel comfortable to rookie free agents still trying to prove themselves.

“That’s the way it should be,” veteran linebacker Keith Brooking said. “That’s what pushes you, that’s what makes you better.”

The Cowboys already had cut several other high-priced veterans, including linemen Marc Colombo and Leonard Davis. By adding Gurode to the list, Tony Romo’s blockers will include three inexperienced linemen: Phil Costa at center, top pick Tyron Smith at right tackle and seventh-rounder Bill Nagy at left guard.

Costa, a hard worker as a rookie last year, played in four games and started once, at left guard. He became the first-team center at the start of camp because Gurode was on the physically unable to perform list. Gurode got a chance to reclaim the job once he was healthy, but the Cowboys decided he wasn’t so much better than Costa that he was worth keeping, not when they could also save $5.5 million against the salary cap by cutting Gurode.

Costa missed the last preseason game with a strained ligament in his right knee and won’t play Thursday against Miami, but the Cowboys are counting on him being ready for the opener Sept. 11 against the New York Jets.