Okay, we're all fans here, so we expect the team to go undefeated through the Super Bowl every year. So far, we've been disappointed 50 straight seasons. But among the paid experts, teams are often judged by how far they have either fallen short of, or exceeded preseason expectations.
 
With all the talk a few weeks ago about "December collapses," I wanted to write about this, but didn't want it to sound like excuse-making. But the fact of the matter is most of the experts had Dallas in third place in their division, bottom half of the league, and missing the play-offs.
 
(Well, this guy had them at 11-5.)
 
Everybody has a right to be an armchair quarterback, it just bugs me when these guys predict a bad season, and still act surprised and disappointed when it looks like they'll be right. But don't expect anybody to say the Cowboys have exceeded expectations, or that they are some kind of Cinderella story, even though most of them thought this was an 8-8 team that would struggle to replace T.O. and had no chance to win the division.
 
Right now, the Cowboys have already exceeded most experts' predictions, and a win next week would exceed almost all of them. A play-off win would prove virtually 100% of them wrong.
 
As always, just a little food for thought...