For the past week, I’ve been telling you just how bad the St. Louis Rams are as a football team. I’ve told you that they were a team without a heart. For the better part of a month I’ve told you not to worry about the final week of the season, because the Cowboys would easily handle the Rams. I was wrong.

No, I don’t believe I was wrong with my assessment of the Rams. I was wrong with my assessment of the Cowboys.

If you are a Dallas Cowboy, shame on you. Yes, you had nothing to play for but neither did the Rams. Last week I wrote about the Rams having no heart. I was wrong. After watching the game, I think it is fairly clear which team had no heart.

If you are a Cowboy fan you can be truly embarrassed. The Cowboys showed no energy, no spark and no desire. And they were playing against a team that had given up 8 weeks ago and was just trying to finish out the season. Horrendous! Simply horrendous!

This club sucked tonight and should be ashamed of itself. The performance against the Rams was simply unacceptable. The Rams are not a good football team. But the Cowboys made the Rams look unbeatable.

The Rams beat the Cowboys by 10 points and it could have been worse…much worse. One Rams field goal attempt hits the upright, another falls short after the most bogus intentional grounding call I’ve ever seen. The Cowboys were simply never in this game.

And, I’m not buying the “…we were deflated because Washington and Carolina wrapped up the final two playoff berths” excuse. That excuse is the leavings of a large farm animal.

If anything, the Cowboys should have been motivated to finish out strong and prove that they were a worthy playoff contender. Instead they proved that they belonged with the also-rans. They proved that they were no better than any other team in the middle of the pack.

The Cowboys offensive line made the Rams defense look like the ’85 Bears or the 2000 Ravens. Julius Jones gains 35 yards on 15 carries and he had a 28 yarder. Think about that. In his other 14 carries Jones went 7 yards. That’s ½ a yard per carry.

Drew Bledsoe completes 18 of 39 for 242 yards. He throws for 1 touchdown and 2 interceptions. He also gets sacked 5 times and loses a fumble.

After thinking long and hard about the DFW Sportsman of the Year, one name seemed to leap out at me: Jerry Jones

The metamorphoses of Jerry Jones from “gunslinger owner” to a remarkably effective executive working with other people is complete. When the idiosyncratic Bill Parcells arrived it seemed only a matter of time before this became a lit-match-and-dynamite relationship.

While there may have been and still are conceivably significant behind the scenes disagreements between the two, Jones has given Parcells the kind of personal space and major voice in Jerry’s beloved Cowboys.

No one since Jimmy Johnson has been accorded that kind of freedom. In what often looked like a one man organization.

Having done that Jones then threw himself into an off-season that saw the Cowboys make the most significant free agent signings in the NFL. Bledsoe…Henry…Rivera…Ferguson…Aaron Glenn. All cost Jones a bunch of money. But all have returned dividends of varying positive degrees.

Trades for Fujita and Pile were solid. The draft, where Jerry was often accused of meddling, may have been the best in the entire league. Anyone truly looking at the Cowboys this off season would have to consider Jerry Jones as a major contender for NFL Executive of the Year. In addition, Jones very quietly continues his role as a major philanthropist in this area.

You have likely never heard of my "Sportsman of the Year'' -- in large part because Chandler Jackson didn't live long enough to be heard of, didn't even live long to become a man.

Be prepared to scratch your head and dab your eyes about a tragic sports story. Be prepared to then get out from under that keyboard so you can go interrupt whatever game it is those kids of yours are playing. And be prepared to ring in the New Year by hugging those kids and never letting go. ...

"He was my son, my best friend and my hero,'' the mourning father of the 12-year-old boy tells me. "And I lost them all on that day."

This is the story of Chandler Jackson, a terrific athlete and a terrific boy who was growing up straight and tall in Frisco, Texas. Chandler tested up two grades in middle school despite his ADHD. He attended Hebron Community Church and "was blessed with spiritual gifts,'' says his older sister. He wasn't "into girls'' yet, but he was close friends with kids of all ages, shapes and sizes.

"A special angel,'' Rick calls him.

And maybe a special athlete, too. Named after former baseball commissioner Happy Chandler, the kid was born to play ball. Organized baseball when he was 3, busting windshields with homeruns. Skateboarding like a madman, and stopping to help others catch up. Skeetshooting. Swimming. And golf? The kid parred a hole by the time he was 6.

Who knows? Maybe Chandler would've matured into an adult, a leader, a star. ... and maybe he wins "Sportsman of the Year'' in a more conventional manner.

But. ...

The golf clubs were at the ready during a family outing in Kentucky for the Fourth of July. Oh, there would be other activities at the annual celebration -- the fireworks and the tractors and the boating and the barbecue and the homemade ice cream and Chandler blurting out theatrically, "This is the best day of my life!" -- but golf with a father and a son?

What could be better, warmer, safer, than a round of golf?

Young Chandler teed off at No. 5 at Dogwood Hills. His shot was errant and to the right. The kid went after his ball.

And two hours later, Chandler Jackson was dead.

Someone hears a "snap.'' And then a cry for "Help!" coming from a gulley. Chandler's friends go to him and see blood shooting into the air. There is a puncture wound through the boy's neck. He is turning blue.

There are emergency people. A helicopter. Five surgeons working on Chandler for 90 minutes. But in the end, at 9:30 p.m., July 6, 2005, Chandler Hugh Jackson is pronounced dead, the result of massive hemorrhaging caused by a direct impalement puncture that entered just below his Adam’s apple, angled sharply downward after glancing off a bony protrusion of his breast plate, and completely sheared off his carotid artery and partially sliced his aorta.

In short, the boy died from somehow being stabbed with a piece of his own golf club.

The "snap'' was the sound of the club breaking. Chandler was impaled by a seven-inch-long part of the shaft. Some wonder why the accident wasn't more thoroughly investigated. Others wonder if golf clubs possess the hidden potential for more such accidents and need to be reviewed. And then there is the unsolved mystery of what Chandler was doing with that club while locating his ball. Was he leaning on it? Did he stumble and fall? Was it, as spiritual leaders like to say, simply "his time''?

Says Chandler's mom, Charmane, "People say he’s in a better place, but I hate that. He was having a great life, and he was making life great for so many other people. How could it be better? ... My faith is really, really being tested.''

Only Chandler and God know what happened down in that gulley. And only God can possibly explain WHY it happened. I mean, young people die. And it's always tragic. In the case of the 18-year-old son of Colts coach Tony Dungy, it is inexplicable enough, and it was an apparent suicide. But the hows and whys of Chandler's death. ... Every year a dozen or so American kids will die on a golf course. Lightning, maybe. Or a bee sting. A drowning. Head trauma from being hit with a club.

But being stabbed by one's own club?

As a friend of mine who is close to the Jacksons puts it, "This is a one-in-a-million kid dying in a one-in-a-million way.''

We all grieve in our own way. The family's way:  The Chandler Hugh Jackson Youth Foundation (www.chandlerjackson.org), with the purpose of providing less fortunate kids the opportunity to travel, play sports, attend camps and live life to the Chandler-like fullest.

"We want Chandler’s memory to inspire other kids," Rick tells me, fighting through tears. "We want to send teams to baseball tournaments or just give a kid a chance to make a birdie putt. Something positive they can take with them for strength when they face adversity in their life. We want them to have experiences like he did. We want other kids to say, like he did, "It was the best day of my life!’

"That,'' Rick Jackson says, "is the only way for us to make any sense out of what happened."

It might also be the way to get you, and the rest of the planet, to concur with me about Chandler's "Sportsman of the Year'' candidacy. Raise awareness. Raise money. Help kids.

Chandler Jackson was buried last July. For all eternity he now wears a bracelet that reads "Eat. Sleep. Play Ball."

Your kids might be out playing right now. Scratch your head. Dab your eyes. Consider Chandler Jackson for "Sportsman of the Year.'' And then celebrate your New Year by interrupting the kids and getting that hug.

It’s the final week of the 2005 NFL Season. And plenty of teams are jockeying for playoff berths. This can also be a frustrating week for handicappers. It’s a week when handicappers have to figure out who’s going to play hard and who’s given up.

That brings us to the Rams. Who are the Rams? Well, they are a team that can still move the ball and score some points. But you know what? I wonder how much heart this team still has in Week 17.

Look at their season, they lost their head coach. They’ve lost a lot of games. They’ve lost a lot of emotion. So, what crawls into Texas Stadium Sunday night?

There is an aspect of this football game that is dramatic. Absolutely dramatic. The Rams are usually a terrible defensive football team. They are also terrible on special teams. But, inside the defensive numbers there is something that Bill Parcells must be drooling over. The Rams give up 4.9 yards per carry.

Defensively your aim is to get into the 3’s (3.6, 3.7). At 4 you start saying, “…I’ve got a problem with my defense…” The Rams are close to 5. That is staggering!

If this game means something, Julius Jones will go for 200 against this team. This might be all and all the absolute worst run defense in the league. And a reborn Julius Jones coupled with a Coach who loves to run the ball could spell disaster for St. Louis.

If you are a Rams fan, even with all of the problems, you can look back at some awful losses against some awful teams and think “…how did we lose to them?”.

This is the National Football League and in the NFL some teams just fall into a downslope. The Rams are definitely on the downslope.

The Rams have lost their identity. They have lost their heart. The Rams used to scare you. The Rams had the most aggressive offense in the league. They could outscore anyone. If you fell behind against the Rams, you knew that you would never catch up.

Things have changed. This Rams team doesn’t scare anybody. If you have anything that resembles a running game you are going to run all over this team. The Rams need their identity back.

They remind me of the Cowboys of the late 90s. In the span of 3-4 years, the Cowboys completely lost their identity as an organization. The team that dominated most of the decade had fallen on hard times. They would spend the first part of the millennium trying to find their identity.

When Bill Parcells took over, the Cowboys were a ship without a rutter. They had no direction. They were a team in search of a heart. Parcells has given this team direction. He has given Cowboys fans a reason to be optimistic.