Parents, don’t let your kids grow up to be Cowboys fans

Parents, don’t let your kids grow up to be Cowboys fans

Posted on February 14th, 2022 by Scott Warnock

Note: To people who don’t care about football, this one has little for you. Also, those of you who grew up around Dallas and/or in the 70s or 90s, you get a free pass here: I still hate your team, but not you. Any reader may be puzzled if not stunned by my visceral anger about this topic.

I won’t say I’m a reasonable man. I don’t like to leave myself that wide open to my “friends.”

So I’ll just say that I’m particularly unreasonable about that loathsome football group from Dallas. We have a duty to make sure kids don’t become Cowboys fans. The things that are wrong with football, sports, and our country are embodied by this pompous, underachieving team.

First, they have a nickname–and nobody outside Dallas should ever mention it–that consists of using a shortened form of the United States of America and making it appear through insidious use of possessive case that the entire country feels deep connection to this organization, a bit of linguistic- and grammar-fueled subterfuge.

This shameless marketing ploy was developed in the late 70s by, of course, a broadcaster. As a result, because the perception of the team’s popularity increased their games were televised more, a vicious cycle, a vortex of fame.

Putrid. If you don’t see how the long shadow of such celebrity behavior soils our whole culture, you’re not looking.

The organization also stands as an exemplar of entitlement, that you deserve something just because. Certainly, pro sports has plenty of entitlement, but the Cowboys and their despicable, ghastly, prunish owner take such hubris to another level.

The NFL has bent over backward for this club. Pay attention! After the Cowboys lost ungracefully in the playoffs this year (more about this in a moment), a screen chyron noted that it had been blank blah-blah # of years since this loser franchise had been to an NFC Championship game, as if it’s their birthright, as if it’s shocking news.

(Note that both analysts on the champion game broadcasts were former Cowboy quarterbacks. The league will not break the addiction! [Although, truth be told, dammit, I don’t mind Aikman, even though he was overrated as a quarterback: see below].)

Get this: In the past quarter century, of the 32 NFL teams, only six scrub organizations haven’t made it to the conference championship game. The Cowboys are in this group: The bottom 20%. In this century, they have the 12th best record. This is an average-to-bad franchise with a long-standing record of failure that surrounds it like a miasma.

The Cowboys also exemplify how those who do the real work get overlooked. Dallas was solid in the 90s, but those teams were good primarily because they had the best offensive line in history, a squad regularly at the top of lists like this and this.

If you’re a football fan, you know what I’m talking about. This line allowed the skill players, the guys who get all the ads and attention, to lead overly inflated career. Running back Emmitt Smith is the worst example. He was a solid little running back who would have had a decent NFL career, but behind this line, he ended up in the Hall of Fame.

Watch his “highlights” compared to those of any of the truly great running backs. Mostly he’s running untouched down the field with maybe a porky little stiff arm at the one-yard line or he’s jogging untouched through a massive hole for yet another two-yard score. I have a less-than-svelte friend who could’ve scored 20 touchdowns a season behind Smith’s O-line–and I don’t mean in my buddy’s “prime” 30 years ago. I mean now. Smith is completely overrated and despite his gaudy stats isn’t even a top 25 all-time NFL back.

There’s also this illusion about Dallas gentility. People love to blab about Philadelphia Eagles fans throwing snowballs at Santa, but that is an overhyped and misrepresented story. One, it happened 54 years ago, and, two, it actually shows Eagles fans are hard to fool!: That day, they were disgusted by a shabby Santa at the end of a shabby season and they let their club know it!

Okay, Philly did have a jail in the bowels of old Veterans Stadium. That one is harder to explain away, but at least Philly fans have the sense/class to beat up the other team, as opposed to the in-bred fight club among Dallas fans after their typical nosedive in the playoffs this year, when the fans actually beat each other up after another early elimination. This left their QB apologizing.

The Cowboys have long been an example of what’s wrong with everything. If you know a young person rooting for Dallas, fix it. They deserve better.

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Scott Warnock

Scott Warnock is a writer and teacher who lives in South Jersey. He is a professor of English at Drexel University, where he is also the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education in the College of Arts and Sciences. Father of three and husband of one, Scott is president of a local high school education foundation and spent many years coaching youth sports.