Sunday Night Football Afterword: Cowboys vs Dolphins

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Hall of Fame.

Preseason games are rarely newsworthy. In fact, there is a good chance that I won’t dedicate a whole blog post to any of Washington’s preseason games this year.

The Hall of Fame game is a little different for me. Most importantly, it marks the end of the NFL’s six-month hiatus from on-field action. Baseball usually holds me over, but between my Yankees’ roster changing almost every day and now these PED suspensions, I’m ready to get back to the gridiron.

In addition to marking football’s return, the Hall of Fame game is a great occasion to celebrate all of the members of Pro Football’s Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. The new members offer insight into their induction speeches from the night before, and old members reunite with former teammates and rivals and share stories from their days in the league.

The game itself was pretty much what you expect a preseason game to be. We didn’t see very much from the starters, but we got our first sense of which backups will make the 53-man roster.

I think the player who stood out the most to me was Phillip Tanner, the Cowboys’ running back in his fourth year out of Middle Tennessee State. On one play, he was hit so hard his helmet flew off, and he still bounced off the tackle and kept running despite a new rule that calls the play dead as soon as the runner’s helmet comes off. He made several other spectacular plays spinning out of tackles, bouncing off defenders and hitting holes through the trenches.

Miami struggled, but nobody should expect their second and third string defense to do very well. They have a very solid starting unit, but Joe Philbin hasn’t had enough time in Miami to get the depth that unit wants. On offense, losing Reggie Bush hurts them, but I think their running game will still do well enough as long as Mike Wallace is healthy and can be used as a threat down the field. I look forward to seeing him player later in the preseason.

As for Dallas, they didn’t play very many of their starters at all in this game, but their backups were clearly better than Miami’s. Unfortunately, in the preseason there isn’t much more analysis you can get beyond that.

Be sure to keep an eye out for blog posts throughout the preseason, as well as podcasts of The All-Sports Crew and our new NFL show. I post links to all of them on Facebook and on my Twitter, @cpuffnfl.