Such a strange half-lit landscape he travels now, this Jason Garrett. His physical body still walks the Dallas Cowboys sideline, watching his football team get lit up by Mitchell Concannon Douglass Trubisky. The rest of him ...
Well. The rest of him, the dead-man-walking part of him, is already gone.
He's a ghost who just hasn't crossed over yet, the Former Coach of the Cowboys walking around in the Current Coach's body. He walks that sideline, and every day the voracious American media acts as if he doesn't. The media, and through it the country, has already moved on.
Jason Garrett may still be the Cowboys coach. But everyone talks about that in the past tense, as if he's already been fired and Ron Rivera or Jim Harbaugh or Josh McDaniels is the new head coach.
What an odd, excruciating existence this must be. The axe hasn't fallen, and the part of you that made you a football coach to begin with won't let you admit it's going to. Yet you can feel its cold steel on your neck virtually every waking hour.
How do you handle this, if you're Jason Garrett?
Do you admit what you won't admit, can't admit, and start shipping out resumes? Do you just wait for the phone call from Jerry? Do you draw the blinds, unplug the TV and all your other devices, and pretend no one is saying what they're all saying out there in the wired world?
To be sure, he shouldn't be the Cowboys coach anymore. He probably shouldn't have been for the last several years. The Cowboys have consistently under-performed for him, and never more so than this season.
But no one with a beating human heart in his or her chest would wish this bizarre situation on anyone. If the rewards from being at the top of your profession are great, so are the torments. And this is the torment part for Jason Garrett, this hellscape limbo in which he twists.
He walks the sideline, and with every step it recedes from him. He walks the sideline -- waiting, and waiting, and waiting some more, for the phone to finally ring.
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