SAN ANTONIO — In that giant gurgling sound that the Dallas Cowboys’ 2008 season became, few performances clogged the regal expectations as Patrick Crayton’s did.

Not that last year’s circus needed a sidekick for the franchise clown, Terrell Whatshisname. But Crayton was roundly expected to assume the role of Owens’ No. 2, catch about 60 passes, and wow the world’s media corps with his glib insights during Super Bowl week.
You brought the popcorn. Crayton didn’t bring the game.
He calls it a disappointing year, and he isn’t being modest.
“It wasn’t what we expected,” he said after the Cowboys’ Saturday afternoon practice at the Alamodome. “It was a disappointing year. You go 13-3 and then come back and go 9-7 with pretty much the same team, that’s just underachieving.”
Crayton lumps himself in with the underachievers. Expected to be quarterback Tony Romo’s sure-handed alternative to Owens and Jason Witten, Crayton started only seven games and caught but 20 passes in the season’s final 10 games.
In the franchise’s quest to make life easier for Romo, it paid over sticker price at the trade deadline and added Roy Williams from Detroit.
That’s how far Crayton’s star had fallen. The Cowboys thought enough of him near the end of the 2007 season to sign him to a four-year, $14 million contract.
But one infamous drop in the playoff loss to the Giants and one mutinous, finger-pointing season with Owens later, Crayton found his lineup spot being allegedly upgraded by someone from the Lions.
“They brought Roy in to help the team,” Crayton said. “He’s proven since he’s been in this league that he can play.
“I understood. I didn’t look at it as a demotion. Some people did. I look at it as we added another weapon to our arsenal.
“I was willing to step aside and welcome him in. Let’s get to work and keep doing what we were doing.”
It didn’t happen that way, though. Nothing followed the script for the Cowboys last season, from the first episode of HBO’s intrusive “Hard Knocks” to the final, 44-6 kick in the teeth in Philadelphia.
But Crayton didn’t go home to pout. He went to the gym to work.
Knowing that strength and conditioning coach Joe Juraszek had a full schedule, Crayton sought the help of former Cowboys assistant Lance Walker at the Michael Johnson Performance Center.
“He’s the director over there,” Crayton explained. “He already knows Joe Juraszek’s workout stuff, so he incorporates some of Joe’s stuff with his own. Over there I could get a lot more one-on-one attention.
“He put all my technique on film, and then was able to redo all my technique so that I can get better, faster and more explosive than I was.”
Selected in the seventh round of the 2004 draft, Crayton turned 30 in April. He’s the rare veteran who understands — some never do — that the older he gets, the harder he has to work in the off-season.
Crayton has welcomed the relative quiet of this circus-less training camp.
“It’s a lot easier for us as a team to focus,” he said. “You don’t have any distractions. You don’t have to worry about what you can say and can’t say, or the camera always being on you.
“You can get out here and it’s all business.”
The Cowboys? All business?
It’s never just business with the Cowboys.
But in the Woodstock bliss of a camp without Terrell Owens, it has to be comforting to Crayton to know that the only ones he has to please are the coaches.
They love what he’s done so far this camp, by the way. The No. 2 job appears to be his to lose.
Thanks to Crayton’s work with Walker, he thinks he’s stronger and faster, especially coming off the line of scrimmage.
“The whole thing was just a matter of different technique,” Crayton said.
“Coming off the line was the main thing, realizing that your first three steps are the most important part of getting into your route.”
Crayton wants to be able to explode his way past the defensive backs that seemed to clog his way all last season.
Mostly, though, he wants to get back on the path that he was on in 2007.
For now, the job is all his.