As we circle the drain on an NFL season whose headlines have been dominated by off-field controversies, which at times have yielded events on-the-field to a pedestrian and mostly unremarkable position by comparison, it’s fitting that, at the onset of the playoffs, we seem to be merely killing time to a premeditated, Pats-Seahawks Super Bowl.  The games this year have felt a lot like a casual distraction — a reminder for followers and lovers of the NFL of what the sport actually is as we grapple with how its governing body presents itself to society.  We’ve spent Sundays this fall trying to reconcile our love for football with its abysmal, culturally destructive governance — it’s been a gloomy experience, and that the games have seemed mostly unspectacular hasn’t helped to abate the struggle.

It’s possible that this season — the games, anyway — haven’t been as mediocre as they’ve seemed.  Maybe the noxious cloud that has surrounded the commissioner’s office this year — for longer than that, really — has dulled our perception of the play itself.  Maybe our senses are tricking us into to feeling that this football season has been tedious and flat simply because it’s been really tough this year to get excited about a league that has spent 9 consecutive months behaving deplorably, one in whose every public statement can be found a single, consistent underlying message: “We think you’re all idiots, and we’re untouchable.”  It feels all right to sit back for the next few weeks and let the bracket play out exactly the way we all think it will, and let this season come to a formulaic and uninspiring end, one wholly reflective of the entire 2014 season.

Although…not so fast?  Maybe?

One team may be able to break from procedure.  One team has a chance to spit all over the equation that’s been laid out for us and spin a bleary and bleak season into chaos.  One team:

Ladies and gentleman, your 2014 Dallas Cowboys.

The very idea makes me want to weep into my pillow and also it’s perfect.  In a season as depressing as this one has been, what better way to punctuate it, what better kick in the collective football fan’s groin, than a Dallas Cowboys Super Bowl?  What could possibly make you hate yourself more, make you feel worse to be a football fan than Roger Goodell has made you feel over the last year, than to have the final image of this putrid season be Jerry Jones hoisting the Lombardi Trophy?  The symbolism is so glorious that I can’t tell whether I should root for it or throw up into my shoes.

The best/most horrible part is: it’s remarkably plausible.

The commentary surrounding the league’s transition to a vertical passing offense, and the ease with which teams can throw the ball, has become ubiquitous and boring (and just about all of it, obviously, absolutely true), but still overlooked is the cliched importance of rushing and defense in the playoffs, when the measure of success is winning one game against one opponent, and moving on to do it again.  Super Bowl champions of the last five years have had notoriously atrocious rushing attacks, with one exception — last year’s Seahawks, who also happen to be the Cowboys biggest challenger in the NFC this year.  It’s absolutely true that teams in recent history have been able to win Super Bowls with nothing better than a Brandon Jackson/John Kuhn (read: sack of potatoes) tag-team running game, but DeMarco Murray’s presence equips the Cowboys to outmatch this year’s competition.  It’s reductive to say that the one of the easiest ways to beat the Packers is to keep the ball out of Aaron Rodgers’ hands, but it’s also a pretty certain truth.  In Green Bay’s four losses this season, they’ve lost TOP by an average of 9 minutes/game.  DeMarco Murray’s roughly eight thousand rushing attempts have helped Dallas top the league in overall and average time of possession, controlling an average of 55% of each game.  In their Week 6 victory against Seattle, Dallas dominated TOP — 37 / 22, they shut down Russell Wilson, and DeMarco had 115 and a touchdown against the league’s 3rd-ranked rushing defense.  More than Detroit, with its frequently-injured offensive superstars and its easily-imploded defensive personalities; more than Arizona, with its Wednesday Night Taco League quarterbacks; maybe even more than Green Bay, with its in this case notable inability to defend the rush; this Dallas team is equipped for a literal and figurative run.

The biggest fear that Cowboys fans probably have, at this point, is that they miss the NFC Championship Game by some very Cowboys-y Romo-y catastrophe, and the front office in early February sounds something like this:

Team Exec: Hey, Jerry, whatcha got in that box there?

Jerry Jones: Nothing.

Team Exec: Are you sure?  It looks pretty heavy.  What’s your face doing?  You look like a pickled six hundred year old radish.

Jerry Jones: I am winking at you furtively so that you will leave right now and ask no further questions.  Who sent you here?  Was it Johnson?

Team Exec: It’s addressed to Minnesota…what the hell–

Jerry Jones: Get out of here!  Leave this place!!

Team Exec: Dammit Jerry this is every first round pick for the next eleven years-

Jerry Jones: Adrian!!!!

Team Exec: NOOOOOOO!!!

Jerry jones: ADRIAAAAN!!!!!!

Anything can happen, of course, but among the uncertainty lies two looming possibilities — we put this dismal season to bed with a long Cowboys run that will make us all hate ourselves for being football fans, or it comes to a colorless, predictable on-field end followed by Jerry fire-saling his team’s future in an extravagant display that will make us all hate ourselves for being football fans.  Sort of like the 2014 NFL season, this column has felt like a failed exercise in optimism.