The Cowboys set their sights on becoming the first team to play a Super Bowl in their home stadium, so their 6-10 finish was not what they had in mind. At one point it was worse. This team was 1-7 before they fired Wade Phillips and missing quarterback Tony Romo for likely the rest of the season with injury. Interim coach Jason Garrett brought this team some much needed discipline, doing things such as making players bring notebooks to film study (what a novel concept), and led them to a 5-3 record even with backup quarterback Jon Kitna.

With Jason Garrett getting the interim tag removed and simply becoming their Head Coach for the 2011 season, and with Tony Romo coming back, they do have a lot of promise for 2011. Garrett’s offensive genius turned Jon Kitna into a 66% passer with a 7.4 YPA in the 2^nd half of the season so it’ll be interesting to see if he can take Romo to the next level. If he can, look out. Romo’s got the weapons (Dez Bryant, Miles Austin, Roy Williams, Jason Witten, Tashard Choice, Felix Jones) to make this one of the top offenses in the league.

Unfortunately, offense is only half the battle. Dallas’ pass defense fell from 13^th in 2009 to 29^th in 2010. Their run defense fell from 9^th to 18^th. their total yards allowed fell from 9^th to 23th. Their points per game allowed rose a whopping 11.7 points per game. Most importantly, none of those things got all that much better under Jason Garrett.

I don’t know what happened to this defense, but they are no longer an elite unit. In fact, they’re far from it, even with DeMarcus Ware leading the league in sacks with 15.5. the Cowboys will almost certainly use their 9^th overall pick on some sort of defensive player. They should have high hopes going into 2011, but I think they need to rediscover their talent on defense to be considered a true Super Bowl contender.