Jason Witten¡¯s first year off the playing field and in the broadcast booth hasn¡¯t always gone smoothly. Witten acknowledges that.Witten has been mocked for https://www.dallascowboysfanshop.com/Michael-Gallup-Jersey , among other things, saying Aaron Rodgers ¡°pulls another rabbit out of his head¡± and suggesting that the NFL had become ¡°left wing¡± with its increased emphasis on player safety, and he said on an ESPN media conference call that he understands the criticism.¡°Yeah, there¡¯s been some flubs,¡± Witten said. ¡°I mean I made mistakes. You try to own it, you embrace it. Hell, I¡¯m not perfect, I¡¯ve certainly had my fair share of mistakes on live television and more than anything else you try to embrace it, you laugh at it, you smile at it, I had the remark on Twitter that you don¡¯t try to deny it. You know, I got a few texts from my wife and it¡¯s good to see her laughing at it when I get home the next day and talking about it. So it¡¯s a transition, I try not to take it too serious, I really try to embrace it, and focus on improving. I understood when I took this job that it was going to be hard, it was going to be a transition.¡±One of the reasons Witten takes criticism is that he suffers in comparison with his old teammate Tony Romo, who went directly from the Cowboys to the CBS booth with rave reviews. Witten¡¯s transition hasn¡¯t been as smooth.¡°Certainly with Tony and the success that he had, I really try not to live in that world and fully embrace it and continue to get better and evaluate it, but I think with the flubs I certainly do not deny it https://www.dallascowboysfanshop.com , I don¡¯t try to hide it and as you said, that¡¯s really all you can do in those moments is self-deprecate and move forward. So over time I hope to improve and get better at it, but yeah, that¡¯s kind of my approach with it,¡± Witten said.Publicly, ESPN has been supportive of Witten. Privately, they probably thought they were getting something closer to Romo. Earlier this week we looked the last 11 Cowboys rookie classes to see how much playing time they contributed to the team. We found that the six rookie classes since 2013 have shown a strong playing time contribution, and that the success of the recent rookie classes has been a key driver in building a young contender in Dallas.In that context, long-time training camp regular and BTB-member YumaCactus wondered if looking at team age on a per-snap basis might be a better indicator of the age of a team than the more traditional approach of simply looking at the average age of a roster - regardless of how many snaps each player played.Foolishly, I agreed to take a look at the ¡°age of snaps¡± per NFL team. Last year, 2,026 individual players took at least one snap in the NFL regular season, per the snap count data available from Football Outsiders. Matching that data set with each player¡¯s birthday as listed at Pro-Football-Reference.com proved to be a bit tedious, but yielded some interesting results:Snap-for-snap, the Cowboys had the youngest team in the NFL in 2018. On December 30, 2018, the day on which the bulk of the Week 17 games were played, the Cowboys had a snap-adjusted age of 9,400 days - or 25.7 years. That gave them a four-day advantage over the Cleveland Browns Dallas Cowboys Customized Jerseys , who had the second-youngest team in the league with a snap-adjusted age of 9,404 days. Here¡¯s an overview of the snap-adjusted age of all NFL teams per Dec. 30, 2018: The youth movement in Dallas has been going on for quite a while. It¡¯s not always been the result of well-crafted plans (you cannot ¡°plan¡± player retirements), and it¡¯s frequently been accompanied by big dead money hits, but the results in terms of average age are undeniable.The Cowboys ¡°lost¡± eight players who started at least four games for them in 2017, either to retirement, free agency, or simply because they were cut. Here¡¯s how those eight players compare to the eight players the Cowboys put in their roles in 2018: This is certainly not a like-for-like comparison, but just the eight moves here shaved 37 years off the Cowboys¡¯ total roster age, which helped the Cowboys get younger - and hopefully healthier.Billy Beane, general manager of MLB¡¯s Oakland A¡¯s and protagonist of Michael Lewis¡¯s Moneyball, described the health benefits of a younger roster succinctly in an interview with the Financial Times a while back.Look at the table above and the list of players lost. Outside of iron man Jason Witten and Alfred Morris, every single player missed time in 2017 due to injury or was significantly affected by an injury in 2017.Dez Bryant struggled through knee tendinitis, Jonathan Cooper underwent surgery for a sprained MCL suffered in the last game of the season, Orlando Scandrick missed games with a fractured hand and transverse process fractures in his back, Anthony Hitchens sat out the first four games of the season with a tibial plateau fracture in his right knee, James Hanna retired because of a knee injury that had hampered him the previous seasons, and Stephen Paea retired with a knee injury after just four games in 2017.The other benefit of youth is the ¡®upside¡¯ that Beane mentions. Young players can be mercurial. They can improve suddenly. They can improve in leaps and bounds. You will not get that type of upside from a veteran player.Which is why being young AND good is so important. Take the Cowboys¡¯ snap-adjusted age of 25.7: the Cowboys could play two full seasons before reaching the average age of their division rivals in Washington and Philadelphia. That is what you¡¯d call a window of opportunity.But the 25.7 is just the overall team age. Football Outsiders split their snap counts by offense, defense and special teams. And while the title of this post already gave it away Dallas Cowboys T-Shirts , it¡¯s worth pointing out again anyway:The 2018 Cowboys had the youngest offense and the youngest defense in the league!On offense, the snap-adjusted age was 26.0, slightly lower than Houston and Cleveland with 26.1 each, but three full years younger than New England. On defense, the team was even younger, with an average age of 25.2, which placed them ahead of Cleveland (25.4) and San Francisco (25.6).On special teams, L.P. Ladouceur (37), Chris Jones and Brett Maher (both 29) push up the average age of the unit to 26.4, ranking the Cowboys 19th in the league, but age may be less important on special teams (at least for the specialists like K, P, LS).Here¡¯s how all NFL teams ranked in snap-adjusted age across all units in 2018. For your convenience, the table is sortable (just click on the blue column headers).Snap-adjusted age per Dec. 30, 2018 But youth for the sake of youth alone (¡°at least we¡¯re the No. 1 at something¡±) is not a winning strategy. The ultimate goal is to win championships, and you build your roster to contend for championships. The Cowboys have just won their first playoff game since 2014. And with a win on Saturday, they could advance to the NFC championship game for the first time since 1996. But regardless of whether they win or lose that game, the youth of the team and the quality of that youth means they¡¯ll likely be able to contend for years to come