DallasCowboys.com Columnist
Feb. 23, 2005, 7:56 p.m. (CST)
traded a third-round pick for a guy who entered the league as a sixth-round pick after not playing any football at all for three years, he just had to be the franchise's quarterback of the future.
Who said?
Just as it was assumed about Quincy Carter and just as it was assumed about Chad Hutchinson.
Balderdash. Those guys are no more than inexpensive stabs by a club which at the time either did not have the salary cap resources or a high enough draft choice to properly compensate for Troy Aikman's departure. Shortcuts, all of them, and not every team ends up with Tom Brady, you know, when doing so.
Look, if Henson isn't the guy, all the Cowboys have wasted is a third-round pick and $3.5 million guaranteed. That's all. That's not like missing with a first-round pick who gets a $15 million signing bonus. Remember, always follow the money, and Henson's money suggests he is a possible guy, but not the guy.
So why should the Cowboys rush Henson into the starting lineup if he's not ready, and obviously, head coach Bill Parcells does not think he's ready and nor does Jones, who said of Henson, "The thing we all should understand is his evolution into being what he wants to be and what we want him to do has to do with Drew and his ability to perform and his ability to be comfortable. And it really, in my view, has very little to do with the situation he's competing with."
Remember, Henson signed a seven-year deal. The Cowboys are not running out of time seasoning him, and however long it takes does not bankrupt their salary cap, not as it would if he was a first-round draft choice. Does it not make sense to the skeptics Henson, as a rookie, is not in the same boat as an Eli Manning or Ben Roethlisberger, or even J.P. Losman, the reason the Bills sent Bledsoe packing on Tuesday?
Hey, the Bills need to get on with it, having made that kind of investment. The Cowboys, they can buy themselves some time, and that's what they have done.
So don't fall into all the rhetoric, that Parcells only wants to play his former players; that Parcells doesn't have the patience anymore to suffer through the growing pains of a young quarterback; that Parcells is wanting to win now, and hit the Jersey Shore; and that Parcells only cares about his legacy, not the future of the Dallas Cowboys.
Oh the Shallow Hals.
If all that was the case, he wouldn't have wasted a year with Carter as his starting quarterback, guarantee you.
Now I know the counterpoint: The Cowboys are just wasting time with Bledsoe when they could be grooming Henson. But what if they were ruining Henson? What if you years of grooming does for him what it evidently did for Chad Pennington?
Plus, listen to Jones when it comes to wasting. In his mind, playing a Henson before his time would be wasting.
"What we really want to do, is we really want to win the next time we go on the football field, but as the same time we'd like to be doing some things that will help us win a year from now, two years from now, three years from now," Jones said. "But the focus we have for our organization and our plan is how we'll be playing in September and October, for the most part.
"I think we're better than we were an hour ago."
That would be hard to argue with.
