Tim Cowlishaw: Cowboys’ task lies somewhere between the unthinkable and the improbable

The Cowboys are not being asked to do the impossible. That task has been assigned to Mike Napoli in left field for the last two weeks.

This lies somewhere between the unthinkable and the improbable being asked to play roughly half a season without Tony Romo and Dez Bryant and remain in contention if not in charge of the slightly hapless NFC East.

If not for the rather severe consequences (the Super Bowl hopes of a team constructed to win a title this season now hanging in the balance and all of that), it’s a fascinating experiment. We always speculate on teams and their most important players and their relative value. Thanks to modern analytics, specific numbers are placed on them and we mostly take these algorithm-fueled conjectures as the undisputed truth.

Bryce Harper plays for a weak team in Washington but he’s been worth two more wins than magical 20-game winner Jake Arrieta has been for the Cubs. It says so right here in Wins Above Replacement.

If Romo and Bryant are, in fact, the Cowboys’ most indispensable players, just how much are they worth? If they were only missing one game, it wouldn’t tell us much. You know what can happen on any given Sunday. But we are going to have more than a handful of games to examine, probably half a season.

Let’s try to compare what this would mean just to the teams around here. I think we can rule out the Mavericks putting together any kind of a season if Dirk Nowitzki and Chandler Parsons were to miss 40 games apiece. It may not be the greatest of seasons regardless, but you get my point.

Basketball is the most talent-driven team sport. The team with LeBron James has a great chance to win a championship. You can’t say that about Clayton Kershaw, as dominant as he has been the last four or five years, or Alex Ovechkin, the finest goal scorer of the last decade.

But LeBron surrounded by anything above an average NBA cast has a decent chance ... unless Steph Curry and Klay Thompson are hitting their 25-footers, then all bets are off.

Hockey has its superstars but they don’t produce automatic hugs with the Stanley Cup. As for the Stars, there is considerable excitement about the approaching season. Remove Jamie Benn and Tyler Seguin for half a season each, and we can almost rest assured that this team (like the wounded Mavericks) will be idle in mid-April.

In baseball, we have seen the Rangers perform miracles without their best player, Yu Darvish. One can argue that an everyday player such as Adrian Beltre or perhaps even Prince Fielder, mostly a DH at this point, has similar value but few people expected this team to be leading the West this late in a season in which Darvish never took the mound.

I think that has to rank somewhere close to Romo and Bryant missing half a season each, especially if you throw in the missed starts of Derek Holland and Martin Perez, as well. The Rangers have managed. Why can’t the Cowboys?

Of course, when you lose a quarterback, some would say your chances ride on the talent of your backup. I would argue that, at this point in 2015, that’s only marginally true. It’s not like anyone is replicating the 49ers of a generation ago with Steve Young waiting in the wings for Joe Montana. Even Steve Beuerlein riding to the rescue for Troy Aikman is nearly out of the question in a 32-team league.

The success of Brandon Weeden, or possibly Matt Cassel a few weeks down the line, rests largely on the play of the offensive line and the entire defense. If the line is what we think it is, and the defense gets faster, better and deeper with the arrivals or returns of Greg Hardy, Rolando McClain and Randy Gregory in the next month, then the Cowboys can go 4-4 over the next eight games with either quarterback performing at their most average levels.

And that would produce a 6-4 record and, at worst, a tie for first in the division. While the costs of these two wins have been exorbitant in manpower lost, don’t minimize the value of having won two division games while New York and Philadelphia stumbled out of the gates at 0-2.

Obviously, the Cowboys might lose a game where Orlando Scandrick is the key missing ingredient. Likewise, they could pick up a victory because of a rival’s missing parts. Still, much of this for two months will be about life without Dez and Romo.

The Cowboys will be different without them, but the size of football rosters and the number of players making an impact keep them from being in awful shape.

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