"The Cowboys have two on the roster, but neither of them know how to play the position," Baldinger said. "You cannot play the position with your head down. You have to be able to beat the double-team. You have got to stay on your feet, nose tackles cannot play on the ground."

He might have a point when it comes to backup Tank Johnson, who hasn't done a whole lot other than force a fumble against the Bengals. But Jay Ratliff has been the Cowboys' best defensive player other than DeMarcus Ware this season.

Maybe Baldinger based his analysis on the Rams game. Pretty much every Dallas defensive starter other than Ware was awful in St. Louis. But Ratliff played at close to a Pro Bowl level through six games. It's ridiculous to pin the Cowboys' problems on him.

At least Baldinger did spread the bashing across the board a bit.

"Right now, the guys are like Velcro, just sticking to the opponent's blocks," Baldinger said. "What happened to the idea of running through ballcarriers, finishing the play? It seems to be lost with the Dallas defenders. What is it with leaving your feet, diving at the feet of running backs? The suffer from this throughout, in every phase of their defense."

"I think play time is always a concern, no matter if you're under contract," Jerry replied. "My experience has been, even with our highest-paid players, when they're not on the field, they're very unhappy. That can come about obviously by injury, but it can also come about because for whatever the reason, they weren't getting the job done."

Sounds good, but means nothing. Wade Phillips said this week that he doesn't plan on making major personnel changes. His hands are tied with his eight-figure-guarantee underachievers anyway.

Everybody knows it'd be asking for a disaster to put T.O.'s butt on the bench. It'd also be foolish to put Patrick Crayton on the field instead of a guy with gamebreaking ability.

Does anybody believe Flozell Adams feels threatened at all by the possibility of being yanked for Doug Free or Pat McQuistan? Didn't think so.

How about Ken Hamlin? I doubt he's concerned about Courtney Brown or Pat Watkins taking his starting job.

So much for using play(ing) time as motivation. Maybe the underachieving, overpaid Cowboys can find some professional pride and/or desire to salvage a season that started with Super Bowl aspirations.

Like the Cowboys had anything to do with that.

Palmer probably had no business playing in the winless Bengals' loss at Texas Stadium. He sat out the previous week with a sore elbow and might have to get Tommy John surgery on it. If he had been healthy, he probably would have hit a wide-open Chris Perry for a couple touchdowns, and we might be talking about a four-game losing streak for the Cowboys.

Anyway ...

Rams RB Steven Jackson will be a game-time decision Sunday against the Patriots. He strained his thigh while rushing for 160 yards and three touchdowns against the Cowboys, which could be considered proof that Dallas' defensive scheme was aggressive enough if you're really desperate.

But Aqib Talib, a Richardson Berkner product drafted five picks before Mike Jenkins, has as many picks in the last couple games as the Cowboys have all season (two). Talib, who plays in the Bucs' nickel and dime packages, is tied for fifth in the league with three interceptions this season.

"He's come in and bought into our system, and that has allowed him to develop," LB Derrick Brooks said. "He's creating confidence every week, facing different types of receivers. I think the mental part of his game is now starting to kick in."

The Bucs have four key offensive players listed as questionable: RB Warrick Dunn, WR Joey Galloway (foot), QB Brian Griese (elbow) and WR Ike Hilliard (head). Griese would back up Jeff Garcia if he dresses out Sunday.

Galloway has missed the last five games with a foot injury and is iffy this week. Ex-Cowboy Antonio Bryant, who arrived in Tampa Bay after stops in Cleveland, San Francisco and NFL purgatory, has filled Galloway's shoes as the Bucs' primary weapon in the passing game.

"He's put it together here," coach Jon Gruden said. "It's real credit to him. ... He's clearly on the rise, and we need his help, that's for sure."

Gruden has mentioned a few times that Bryant was talented enough to start opposite Michael Irvin as a rookie. That's not true -- Bryant arrived in Dallas a few years after The Playmaker's retirement and wore his No. 88 -- but Gruden really only cares about what the ex-Cowboys receivers do after they join the Bucs.

"We like those ex-Cowboy receivers," Gruden said. "They've done quite well for us. If you'd like to pass us a few more, we'd be happy to take them."

1) Whiny Cowboys fans got all hot and bothered last week by the Football Outsider formula that stated the odds were against Dallas making the playoffs. (Then the Cowboys reduced those odds by losing to the Rams, dude.) Let's try to get you back in those folks' good graces. Is there a stat you can point to that provides hope the Cowboys can snap out of their month-long funk?

There are whiny Cowboys fans? On the Internet? No way. I've noticed that the Cowboys fans in the comments are kind, warm-hearted folks, and from what I can tell, many of them are ex-NFL players with decades of experience playing football.

The normal things we look for when it comes to a team that's underperforming their record aren't there with the Cowboys, which is a little scary. DVOA, our core metric that measures a team's performance after adjusting for down, distance, situation, and opponent quality, has the Cowboys as the 21st-best team in football. Not exactly a positive indicator.

The other is performance on third down relative to first and second down. While it's hugely important to succeed on third down, very few teams have the ability to be significantly better on third down than they do on the first two; naturally, great third down teams tend to be great second and first down teams, too. The Cowboys' offense has shown a slight ability to have their third down performance exceed levels on first and second down with Tony Romo as quarterback, but if there's a big split the other way this year, we might be able to forecast some improvement for them on the other downs.

Instead, the Cowboys' offensive DVOA is 11th on first down, 23rd on second down, and...best in the league on third down. The defense is 26th on first down, 25th on second down, and 19th on third down. In other words, we'd expect to see performance on third down decline some more, which would be a negative indicator for the Cowboys.

So, you were saying, some good news? I'll go with our drive stats, which measure exactly what it sounds like; how a team does on each of their drives, taking out kneeldowns at the end of halves.

The Cowboys' offense is currently second in the league in touchdowns per drive, and fourth in points per drive. That's obviously very good. They were fourth in both categories last year.

If you look at the Top 5 in either of those categories from 2006 and 2007, you'll find that every single team made the playoffs. So that's a step in the right direction. In 2005, both the Chargers and Chiefs showed up among the league's best offenses per drive, but neither were able to make the playoffs.

2) When asked this week about his team's penalty problems, Wade Phillips claimed that penalty totals have no correlation to wins and losses. Is that an accurate statement?

Not really. We studied this at length in the 2007 edition of our Pro Football Prospectus, and we discovered the following:

* There's a .21 correlation between penalties and wins; the 25 most-penalized teams from 2003-2007 averaged 1.5 wins less than the 25 least-penalized teams.

* Penalties on defense and special teams bear little-to-no relationship with success ; the correlation between offensive penalties and wins is .31. To use the same indicator from before, the 25 teams with the most offensive penalties over that timeframe averaged 6.2 wins, while the 25 teams with the least penalties averaged 7.9.

So, then, some penalties have no correlation to wins and losses. Others have a decent correlation.

3) The Cowboys are 30th in your special teams rankings. How have teams ranked that low fared over the last few years?

It's certainly possible to win without good special teams. Of course, having great coverage units and kickers helps, but it's just not a large-enough portion of the game to overcome having an excellent offense and defense, as the Cowboys have had the past few years. In 2007, the Colts had the worst special teams in football, and they made it to the playoffs.

That being said, if we look at the five worst special teams in the league (by DVOA) over the last five seasons, only the '07 Colts, the '05 Broncos, and the '04 Rams managed to get to the playoffs. That's three out of 25; not a particularly good percentage.

4) According to the stats, who has been the weakest link in the Dallas offensive line this season?

Hard to say. When we chart the Cowboys Adjusted Line Yards based upon the direction of running plays, Dallas is in the top tens on runs to left end, the middle, and right tackle. They're 21st at runs to left tackle, and 27th on runs to right end. They're also the directions they run at least frequently, though. It also begs the question of who's at fault for that; are those runs to the right Marc Colombo failing to sustain a block at the point of attack, Andre Gurode failing to chip and get to the second level, or Leonard Davis failing to pull to the right side? The blocking on run plays is so fluid and intertwined that it's hard to blame one guy.

Attributing blame for the passing game is also still up in the air. Our Game Charting project tracks whose responsibility each sack is, attributing it to the quarterback, good coverage, or a blown block by a player. Obviously, we're interested in the latter, but there's not much to go on; so far, we only have full data through Week 5. We counted three blown blocks in that timeframe, one each by Flozell Adams, Jason Witten, and Andre Gurode.

So, sort of a roundabout answer, but it's hard to say.

5) Ex-Cowboy WR Antonio Bryant, who could be a matchup problem Sunday, has been a heck of a reclamation project in Tampa Bay. Has good has Bryant been this season according to the FO formulas?

It's been more volume than substance. Bryant's DVOA is, conveniently enough, exactly 0.0%. That's 47th-best among receivers with more than 21 passes thrown to them. He's averaging right around 13 yards a completion, and catching 55% of the passes thrown to him.

Compare that to the performance of Tampa Bay's top receiver last year, Joey Galloway. Galloway had a 16.4% DVOA (16th in the league), catching 58% of the passes thrown to him and averaging a significantly more impressive 17.8 yards per catch. Now, of course, Galloway's a more dynamic downfield threat than Bryant, but that's supposed to be balanced out by a better catch rate by possession receivers -- it's a sliding scale, where a guy like Braylon Edwards can be successful if he catches 55% of the passes thrown to him, but the Wes Welker's of the world have to be right around 70% to be helping their team out consistently. If Bryant was catching a higher percentage of the passes thrown to him, he'd be a valuable player, but as of right now, he's merely an average guy.

"If he can deal with whatever issues he may have, handle his responsibilities, make good decisions, then he may have an opportunity to play again in the league," Goodell said.

"I'm frankly tired of talking about it right now."

I get the feeling Wade Phillips feels the same way.

We asked Gruden on Wednesday about Johnson and he wasn't very good. He was a bit better with the Tampa Bay media on Thursday when he was asked about Johnson being "Captain Checkdown."

"Well, you play against Tampa Two every day, you don't have much choice," Gruden said. "Every day in practice you're going to have to find those passing lanes. He's had 4,000-yard seasons. He's wearing a Super Bowl ring. He threw for 280 yards in the Vet in the NFC Championship Game. I've seen him throw five touchdown passes in a game. Call him whatever you want, he's a hell of a player. He's a good player, a good player. A great guy, too. A winner."