Another week, another blowout loss at home. After winning 16 straight in the “sun-bathed,” made-for-TV confines of AT&T Stadium over the previous two seasons, this past Sunday’s 34-6 rollover-and-wet-yourself submission by the Cowboys — this time to their most hated rival, the effing Philthadelphia Iggles — makes five consecutive home games in which Dallas has not only lost but was absolutely steamrolled to the level of maniacal laughter. All our favorite spooky and silly characters from the Cowboy-fan haunted house this season have made their anticipated jump scares. Eek! There’s injuries to key starters! (Including your $250M QB, likely out for the remainder of the year.) Lurking behind this wall is abysmal offensive performance. Look out! It’s braindead turnovers! Aaagghh! It’s a boneheaded commitment to a washed running back who has attendance problems! Oh, no! It’s a key offensive play falling flat because a receiver can’t see the ball because the freaking sun is in his eyes thanks to the dumb taxpayer-funded stadium! Embarrassing.
How has this flaming refuse bin of a team even won three games? It has been a parade of follies. A total clown show. The entire football world is pointing and laughing at us.
We should be used to it, though. In the Jerry Jones era, the Dallas Cowboys organization has been synonymous with ridiculousness. From the very beginning, with the cocaine- and stripper-fueled tabloid fest that was the ’90s Super Bowl squad, the franchise has been a media sideshow for more than three decades.
A quick, decidedly noncomprehensive rundown of just some of the chaos we’ve been treated to over the years includes multiple player acquisitions of credibly accused or outright convicted domestic abusers and serial barroom brawlers and a longtime PR director ousted for a cheerleader locker room-peeping scandal, along with a litany of player arrests for offenses running the gamut from the fairly innocuous, like the shoplifting of underwear or menial drug possession, to the downright incomprehensible, such as being an accessory to a drive-by shooting that left one person dead or an intoxication vehicular manslaughter case in which one player was responsible for the death of a teammate.
This shocking tally doesn’t even include Jones’ own exploits, which seem to set the extremely low standards for the rest of the organization. His controversies range from the occasional release of embarrassing photographs, be they drunken bathroom selfies with fungirls young enough to be his granddaughters or ones that place him on the wrong side of a racial protest in the Jim Crow South of the 1950s, to the odd audio surfacing of ham-fisted and tone-deaf remarks about interracial dating or outdated epithets for little people or joking unprompted about the size of a player’s package. (What is it with elderly white billionaires’ fixation on athletes’ junk?) Or how about becoming the face of the anti-anthem-kneeling brigade for the entire league? Or his most recent solecism, a paternity suit that made it obvious that the ol’ boy likes to party just as hard as those ’90s cocaine- and stripper-fueled Cowboys teams, and fathered a previously undisclosed daughter with an airport gate agent on the side as a result.
It’s so hard being a fan of this damn team. To do so requires a constant struggle of compartmentalization of competing emotions. It’s difficult to cheer for a first-down run (and its cheesy accompanying spoon-miming) when you know the dude who just ran the play might have beaten his ex-girlfriend but also definitely did expose the breast of an unassuming female paradegoer to the onlooking public on a packed St. Paddy’s Day without her permission. The classic adage of unaccountability in “separate the art from the artist” comes to mind. As if the team is made up of John Lennons, Michael Jacksons, and Louis C.K.s., and we’re just supposed to shut off the part of our brains that knows what awful behavior they’ve subjected innocent people to. Yet those flawed men happened to create lasting contributions to the cultural lexicon. All the Cowboys do is routinely raise my blood pressure to stroke-inducing levels.
With the organization in a perpetual state of increasing stupidity off the field, it was only a matter of time before the circus made its way onto the turf. At least during the regular season. It’s been full three-ring Barnum & Bailey in the playoffs for years. Now the chaos has spilled into the day-to-day, and it’s worse than it’s ever been. Every game gets more lifeless, pathetic, and idiotic. It’d be funny if it wasn’t. You have some players dropping “deez nutz” high-school taunts to reporters, while others are seemingly throwing their head coaches’ or ownership’s lack of end-zone-curtain usage under the bus to other column-fillers in the ever-insatiable Cowboys media ecosystem. And we all continue to eat it up, no matter how much it makes us gag on the way down. There’s perhaps no person who embodies the idiom of “there’s no such thing as bad press” as much as Jerry Jones. (Well, I can think of one other person, but that’s the purview of an entirely different singular subject-obsessed media ecosystem.)
So join me, Cowboys faithful. Don your bulbous red noses and the comically too-big shoes, slather on the white grease paint, and lean into the silliness. This thing is only halfway over.
