Aikman: Cowboys' Next Big Challenge is the Expectations

Jan 16, 08:03 AM

Jan. 16--On the same day former Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman sparked good cheer and optimism for children at a Fort Worth hospital, he spoke in realistic terms about his former employer.

"I'm not one of those who can look at this season for the Cowboys and say how much improvement was made," Aikman said. "This was a playoff team from a year ago, and a team that was expected to go to the playoffs this year."

Aikman was at Cook Children's Hospital on Tuesday along with country singer Garth Brooks to unveil the new "Zone Playroom" for the kids staying in the medical center.

As Aikman knows, the hardest part for these Cowboys comes next season. The Cowboys not only have the proven talent to win 13 games, but now they have the expectations to do it again, and then succeed where this group failed.

"You could look at it and say this team had a really great regular season and accomplished a lot of great things, and it's hard to do what they did," he said. "The hardest part now is next year; they have to go through 16 games and do it all over again to get to January."

Although Aikman now busies himself with calling NFL games on Fox and running his foundation he started in 1992, he knows exactly what these current Cowboys face. He's done it before.

"This is a team much like the teams I was a part of -- nobody cares anymore what you do in the regular season," Aikman said. "The regular season doesn't mean a lot. It's, 'What happens in the postseason?' You go out and don't win a playoff game -- as good as the regular season was, it wasn't good enough."

In Aikman's eyes, the most difficult aspect to this past season for the Cowboys is that this was not a fluke. In his mind, this is a good team that simply flamed out, and that there are no black and white questions to answer this off-season.

This was a team that should have been good enough to at least reach the Super Bowl.

"Some years you can say, 'Well, they need this guy or that guy,' " Aikman said. "They have the pieces in place and that's what makes this so frustrating. You talk about a team that had the year they had -- No. 1 seed, home-field advantage throughout the playoffs -- and then not to be able to take advantage of that is the most difficult part of this."

Looking fit but a bit older than his playing days, Aikman can still draw a crowd and impress the masses. He did Tuesday, as he helped complete a project years in the making. What was once just an idea to be a playroom for hospitalized children has now blossomed into a sports-themed area complete with video games, computers, card games, etc. There are also computers where a child in a New York hospital can talk to a child in Texas hospital and the two could relate to their own experiences.

"We wanted to do something for them because they spend all day in their bedrooms," Aikman said, "and we just wanted to get them out of there so they could have a little bit of fun."

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