Baby Blue
Black metal/shoegaze band Deafheaven put out an excellent record last month called New Bermuda. Its main theme has to do with believing that you have found peace and happiness, only to find a new wave of danger coming over the horizon. On that record, a song called “Baby Blue” ends with the following lyric:
God has sent my calamity into a deep space from which not even in dreams could I ever imagine my escape.
Though George Clarke is certainly screaming about a personal pain only he can know, he somehow found a way to echo the deep despair with which I now watch my Dallas Cowboys.
***
I haven’t written here since after Week 1, when Dez Bryant went down with a foot injury but spirits were still somewhat high.
The very next week in Philadelphia, Tony Romo got his collarbone broken. The recovery time for that is somewhere around nine weeks. Without fully admitting it, I knew our season was done. Most teams in the NFL have a backup quarterback who can reasonably manage a game, but at the time all the Cowboys had was Brandon Weeden.
I’m sure Brandon Weeden is a nice man, which is why I feel slightly guilty in saying he is bad at his job. He is bad at being a quarterback. This proved to be a problem in the subsequent three games, where he tried valiantly to pass the ball to receivers and look like a competent person. He did not successfully do this. To be fair, Dez was gone, and Lance Dunbar saw his own season end with an ACL tear. But even with a limited number of weapons, he still flailed his way into oblivion.
Enter Matt Cassel, 11-year veteran of the NFL. Look at that guy. THAT’S a quarterback, right? His jaw is so strong! He MUST be good at playing quarterback!
No, no he is not. Matt Cassel is not good at that.
He has played two games now, and while he often looks like he knows the vague outline of what it takes to be a quarterback, his flaws come hurtling through like a cannonball. At the end of Sunday’s game against the Seahawks, when the Cowboys were down 13–12 with under a minute left, Cassel slowly scrambled to the sideline, but not before taking a game-killing sack. It was such a rookie-ass mistake that I started putting my shoes on to leave my parents house before the game even ended.
How could I possibly be expected to watch anymore of this?
***
Watching Brandon Weeden and Matt Cassel play quarterback for the Cowboys has been like watching some jerk take your wife on a date where he tries to get her drunk and touch her butt. I hate it.
Tony Romo is supposedly coming back in three or four weeks. Does it even matter? They’re 2–5. They’re not winning another game until he gets back. It will be too late by then. The goddamn Giants or some other ridiculous NFC East team will overachieve just enough to win the division, and the Cowboys will file 2015 in the “Regrets” folder.
This season held so much promise. The Cowboys were wonderful last year, and there was reason to think that could keep going. But then we sailed right into a new Bermuda. Tony and Dez went down. Lance Dunbar went down. Joseph Randle lost his actual job, amid the team’s concerns for his mental health.
We are currently in that deep calamity from which we cannot imagine our escape.
It’s all over now, Baby Blue.
