This Cowboy's work isn't done yet

OXNARD, Calif. -- When Bill Parcells first spoke with Drew Bledsoe last winter about bringing him to Dallas, the Cowboys coach wanted one thing. He wanted straight answers to hard questions.

Parcells has never cared much about gaudy numbers, of which Bledsoe has many, or of other people's opinions, with which Bledsoe has been saddled aplenty. He's never cared much for tact, either.

All he cared about was getting answers that would reveal whether the Drew Bledsoe he was talking to had learned anything from the trials he went through the past four years in New England and Buffalo, and whether those trials had changed him in a way that could not be repaired. Changed not his arm or his downfield vision, but something deeper and more fundamental.

''He wanted to feel out where I was in my mind," Bledsoe recalled recently while relaxing inside a trailer behind the Cowboys' training complex. ''He pressed me hard about how I felt about the game.

''I think if he'd gotten any indication I'd lost confidence or had doubts about the importance of the game to me, things might have gone differently. Maybe my coming here wasn't quite as simple as it may have appeared. But it was very obvious to me that this was the best option in terms of the makeup of the team."

Bledsoe chuckles at such a thought for a moment, knowing what question is on the mind of his interrogator as he speaks about returning to play for the man who once drove him mad. There were days, long days, when Bledsoe couldn't stand the sound of Parcells's voice, when the two came to Foxborough and helped save a dying football franchise.

Some in New England have forgotten those days and what Bledsoe meant back then, in 1993 and 1994 and through most of his time with the Patriots, because it ended badly, and people remember bad endings longer than they do new beginnings.

It ended with Bledsoe underperforming, then nearly dying in an operating room at Massachusetts General Hospital from a hit delivered so hard by New York Jets linebacker Mo Lewis that it sheared open an artery and left him with massive amounts of blood leaking out of his system twice in 24 hours before doctors figured out the problem and saved his life.

Nothing was the same for Bledsoe after that in New England. Under the leadership of his replacement, Tom Brady, the Patriots went on to win three of the last four Super Bowls. Bledsoe became first a sympathetic figure, then a subject of ridicule, and finally an afterthought when he was traded to Buffalo. After half a season of explosiveness there, he again began to struggle with sacks and decision-making.

Now he has come full circle. From the root to the fruit, he hopes. Back to the future. Back to the side of Parcells, who so often tormented him in their first years together with his incessant harping during practice to ''Let it go! Let it GO! LET IT GO!" when Bledsoe would drop back to pass.

''If you told me after he left New England [in 1997] that we'd get back together, I would have told you you were high," Bledsoe said, laughing at this reunion of East Coast wise guy with West Coast relaxed guy. ''But you get away from it and you begin to realize maybe there was a method to the madness.

''I don't know anyone who came in as a young guy and played for Bill who would say it was an enjoyable experience, but you begin to realize there's a reason for what he does and why he does it.

''I understand what he wants now. There's not so much to yell at me for. He hasn't changed, but he does ask my opinion from time to time now. When we were starting out in New England, he didn't want me to have an opinion, and if I did, he didn't want to hear it."

A matter of priorities
Parcells, for his part, knows his fate is wedded to Bledsoe's. It has been 15 years since he last coached a Super Bowl champion, a decade since Bledsoe last led a team into that game. Both are in Dallas seeking an odd form of resurrection, although the quarterback needs it far more than the coach, who has the jewelry Bledsoe does not after winning two Super Bowls when he was the Giants' head coach and being one of only four coaches in history to take two franchises to the only game that seems to matter any more.

As much as he knew he needed a triggerman to get the Cowboys back to prominence, Parcells also knew he had to be sure of Bledsoe. Not of his ability to throw a football, which he believes remains as intact as it was when he threw a record 691 times in 1994 to become the youngest quarterback ever to be selected to the Pro Bowl and 623 times two years later for 4,086 yards, 27 touchdowns, and an unexpected berth for the Patriots in Super Bowl XXXI against the Packers.

The issue for Parcells was where Bledsoe's priorities were at the age of 33. When he got his answer, he asked Cowboys owner Jerry Jones to open his checkbook and he had himself what former Packers general manager Ron Wolf says is ''the best quarterback they've had in Dallas since Troy Aikman."

''Has he changed?" Parcells said. ''He's a grown man now. He was a young kid when I first got him. He knows the game a lot better now. He's a lot crankier now than when I first had him. He's starting to sound like me. He's fun to be around now. He likes to give you the needle. I like that.

''He's more serious-minded about football. He's played winning football on winning teams. He knows what he needs to do. I don't want to ask him to carry all the load. We've got some runners now. We've got two or three runners. I want him to manage the game. I just hope we can get him to play efficiently. I'm hoping we can put enough guys around him to allow him to function well.

''When I brought him in, I asked him if he was still a fastball pitcher or was he like [Greg] Maddux. Was he throwing up all that off-speed stuff? He said, 'No, I'm still a fastball pitcher.' I wanted to hear that, but I want to rein him in a little, too."

That process begins in earnest this afternoon in San Diego, where Bledsoe leads an offense with what appears to be ample if aging weapons. He has a wide receiving corps of old friend Terry Glenn, who caught 90 balls from Bledsoe in 1996, Keyshawn Johnson, and newly acquired Peerless Price, who had a season so great with Bledsoe in 2002 (94 catches, 1,252 yards, 9 touchdowns) that it made him a multimillionaire in free agency.

He also has a dangerous Pro Bowl tight end in Jason Witten and a dashing young runner in Julius Jones who reminds Parcells of Curtis Martin. The line is suspect at right tackle but was shored up in the offseason at the guards because Parcells understands that is where teams like to rush Bledsoe, whose mobility and decision-making have been in question for the past few years.

Pangs of jealousy
Parcells understands, as does Bledsoe, that he cannot continue to be sacked an average of 3.3 times a game if they are to win together again. He understands he cannot see his quarterback pounded to the ground the way he has been over his career, an average of 33.5 times a season. That's 402 times in all, a number his most ardent critics blame him for.

Bledsoe knows all this, of course. He lived it in New England and again in Buffalo, losing his job in both places in part because of it. Yet Johnson has a different take.

''I look forward to him showing up all the critics and the analysts and the so-called experts and proving them wrong," Johnson said. ''There are only three quarterbacks I rank ahead of him, and that's because they can use their legs in addition to their arms: Michael Vick, Donovan McNabb, and Daunte Culpepper.

''Even though Tom Brady has won three championships, if Mo Lewis doesn't hit Drew in the sternum, do we ever hear of Tom Brady in the NFL?"

One would imagine so, but who knows? Bledsoe still believes that had he been given a chance to compete with either Brady in New England or J.P. Losman in Buffalo, he would have prevailed.

''If we'd had a competition, great," he said. ''I've never lost one. But to just give someone the job, I couldn't stand for that."

But that is in the past now. The present is about one last chance, given to him by Parcells not because he's a football philanthropist but because he believes in Bledsoe.

Yet one thing does remain hard to put behind him.

''A lot of guys up there [in New England] I'm very good friends with," Bledsoe said. ''No doubt it's hard to watch. No doubt I'm jealous of what they've done. Tom has busted his butt to be successful.

''I'm happy for them but I'd be lying if I didn't admit it's hard to see the organization have all that success after I've gone. It's OK to acknowledge I helped dig that organization out of mediocrity, but that's bittersweet now."

In his new life in Dallas, Bledsoe believes he can achieve the one goal in football that has eluded him for 12 years. He doesn't care that he is only 192 yards from becoming only the 10th quarterback in history to throw for 40,000 yards. It doesn't matter that he's in the top 20 all-time in nearly every passing category. Those are just numbers, and the only number that means anything any more is 1. Or maybe it should be ''first."

''I think about Jim Plunkett and the similarities between his career and mine," Bledsoe said of the former Patriot quarterback who failed in two places before winning two Super Bowls late in his career with the Raiders. ''It's why I'm still playing. I'm not playing for anything but to come here and win a championship. I think about it a lot. What it will be like.

''I still love the game. I've been able to separate the peripheral stuff from the football part. On the field, I still love the chess match you play with the defense. I love the challenge of trying to bounce back. That's what life's about, so I don't spend much time dwelling on the past.

''I understand the situation I'm in now. I know there won't be another move for me. This one has got to work."