The Dallas Cowboys are doing something different with Christian Parker. Parker is young. He is an outsider (in terms of not having a history with the Cowboys front office). It sounds silly, but Parker comes
from a team that has been highly successful and the Cowboys have not exactly tried to pick fruit from those trees before. Simply put, just about everything that has led the Cowboys to him from a process standpoint has been foreign to the team for a long time.
These are the reasons that so many people are excited about Parker. His difference represents a deviation from the norm. No one is saying that any of these specific qualities are better than other versions of them (older coaches are also very successful, being young doesn’t automatically translate to success just to list an example). The celebration around the Cowboys doing something different is that the Cowboys did something different. If it doesn’t work we are experienced at coming to terms with that, but at least it will have not worked because it didn’t work and not because it was the same old song and dance.
Unfortunately, this means there is a lot of pressure riding on the experiment.
So much is relying on Christian Parker working out
It feels unfair to call the Cowboys hiring Christian Parker an experiment. He is a more than worthy candidate to be the team’s defensive coordinator. Hiring a coach and someone to run your defense is a very serious thing. There is nothing experimental about it in a literal sense.
But those differences that he carries? The deviations from the norm that he represents? What if it doesn’t work out with him?
Is it not possible that the Cowboys could, as anyone would to be honest, look at how they tried things in a different way and saw them fail only to learn the lesson that different was bad? This is an exaggerated way of looking at this idea to be clear, but it is why more than just the defense improving is relying on Christian Parker thriving as the team’s defensive coordinator.
Should Parker succeed, and his track record suggests that he will, then the walls separate the ideas of different infiltrating The Star on a deeper level wear down theoretically, right? If doing something different worked out wonderfully then heck, serve us up some more of that different! It was great!
But again, if different burned the hand then different is bad and should not be approached again. Remember that time we did something different? We made ourselves uncomfortable and look where it got us! We are never doing that again!
The point here isn’t to be dramatic about the evolving Christian Parker era, but it is to note that should he thrive then he may serve to be the blast that Luke Skywalker delivered into the Death Star. He could crumble the fears that different is bad and make way for more of it in the future.
