There is no honor in worshiping a monolith, not really, and so consequently there’s no recompense or sympathy when it is toppled. That is life for those that care about the Dallas Cowboys. To do this is to take a long position on the NFL’s answer to Bear Stearns; it is to run cheering in the wake of a diamond-encrusted boulder that has just rumbled through some humble village. It is football exceptionalism at its highest peak and, now, its lowest valley.
The epistemology behind this particular fealty varies. Sometimes it’s a birthright, or something other than high-volume idolatry; more often, it’s the front-running jewelry store caper one comes to associate with the ritziest franchises. But it all leads to a similarly tacky endgame, the same broken-down luxury liner sputtering into port. Every professional franchise conducts business, of course, but only one has stamped the entire country onto its crest, only one is commanded by an owner who so manages his multi-billion-dollar enterprise like his family’s personal backwater canteen. There is no quiet failure here: America’s Team burns loudly. It is, unmistakably, burning.
Truthfully, even writing all that above seems a touch grandiose; there is no need to aggrandize stupidity, especially on such a lavish scale. This is a bad football franchise and does the things bad franchises do. It doesn’t simply leave positions unaddressed; it willfully and ritualistically ignores them, slapping papier-mache over various craters because to do more would be to admit the need to do more. Instead, they make do, or mostly don’t, with thrift-store safeties and bargain-basement interior linemen.
The Cowboys cannot bear to merely blow mid-round draft picks, either; they waste scores of them, unearthing just two starters after the third round in their last eight drafts. Smart teams require one premium pick at most to fix a roster need; Dallas fumbles through fistfuls, only to see more problems crop up once the first one finally resolves itself; it’s a hopelessly idiotic game of Whac-A-Mole that requires feeding hundred dollar bills, one after another, into a slot built for quarters. Good organizations have roster depth; Dallas employs the likes of Jeff Heath, Nick Hayden and David Arkin, all of whom sound and mostly play like TV actors.
It is, unsurprisingly, very difficult to win this way, which is the exactly the sort of concern that owner-general manager-huckster savant Jerry Jones should bother with and yet somehow cannot be bothered by. Those are concerns for other, lesser teams, the small fry with some sort of fowl or jungle cat on their helmets instead of a bright, gleaming star, the one that was for so long the league’s foremost guiding light.
***
The Cowboys never won quite like anyone else, and they cannot and will not lose as other teams do. It must be bigger and louder and wholly unmerciful, less defeat than overdue penance for past sins. Among bloated American sports franchises, only the Yankees and Lakers can claim this sort of organizational overstatement. But while the former ages into decrepitude and the latter has rotted from the inside out, neither has sunk into an abyss this deep, not yet.
There is no corollary for a team so outsized and significant both in its sport’s history and broader identity winning just one playoff game over 18 seasons, let alone in a league defined by (among other things) its parity. This is made odder still by this fan base’s defiant—in general, and in defiance of nearly two decades of factual failure—insistence on puffing their chests and denying a very palpable descent.
It’s a bad look. Not every Cowboys fan is that way, of course, but enough are, and are so brazenly and grandiosely that way, that it’s pro forma to assume that all involved deserve this particular bit of ironic retribution. If you’re the Cowboys fan, you’re the asshole.
That, I should mention, is me. This is the team I grew up caring about. This is the team that has more recently earned me a bit of well-meaning condescension from a good friend, who happens to be a Browns fan. We have argued idly about which team is more depressing—more buffoonish or idiotically mismanaged or multiply and deservingly doomed. We both know that he will win this argument, if that’s the word. It’s not much of a contest, really; Jones’ autocratic imbecility is no match for the endless carousel of buffoons that comprise Cleveland’s brain trust, and not even the most beaten-down Cowboy supporter can grasp a championship drought that’s eligible for Social Security. Still, he understands the situation.
“The worst part about your liking the Cowboys,” he tells me, “is that you don’t get to enjoy the Cowboys.”The epistemology behind this particular fealty varies. Sometimes it’s a birthright, or something other than high-volume idolatry; more often, it’s the front-running jewelry store caper one comes to associate with the ritziest franchises. But it all leads to a similarly tacky endgame, the same broken-down luxury liner sputtering into port. Every professional franchise conducts business, of course, but only one has stamped the entire country onto its crest, only one is commanded by an owner who so manages his multi-billion-dollar enterprise like his family’s personal backwater canteen. There is no quiet failure here: America’s Team burns loudly. It is, unmistakably, burning.Truthfully, even writing all that above seems a touch grandiose; there is no need to aggrandize stupidity, especially on such a lavish scale. This is a bad football franchise and does the things bad franchises do. It doesn’t simply leave positions unaddressed; it willfully and ritualistically ignores them, slapping papier-mache over various craters because to do more would be to admit the need to do more. Instead, they make do, or mostly don’t, with thrift-store safeties and bargain-basement interior linemen.
The Cowboys cannot bear to merely blow mid-round draft picks, either; they waste scores of them, unearthing just two starters after the third round in their last eight drafts. Smart teams require one premium pick at most to fix a roster need; Dallas fumbles through fistfuls, only to see more problems crop up once the first one finally resolves itself; it’s a hopelessly idiotic game of Whac-A-Mole that requires feeding hundred dollar bills, one after another, into a slot built for quarters. Good organizations have roster depth; Dallas employs the likes of Jeff Heath, Nick Hayden and David Arkin, all of whom sound and mostly play like TV actors.
It is, unsurprisingly, very difficult to win this way, which is the exactly the sort of concern that owner-general manager-huckster savant Jerry Jones should bother with and yet somehow cannot be bothered by. Those are concerns for other, lesser teams, the small fry with some sort of fowl or jungle cat on their helmets instead of a bright, gleaming star, the one that was for so long the league’s foremost guiding light.
***
The Cowboys never won quite like anyone else, and they cannot and will not lose as other teams do. It must be bigger and louder and wholly unmerciful, less defeat than overdue penance for past sins. Among bloated American sports franchises, only the Yankees and Lakers can claim this sort of organizational overstatement. But while the former ages into decrepitude and the latter has rotted from the inside out, neither has sunk into an abyss this deep, not yet.
There is no corollary for a team so outsized and significant both in its sport’s history and broader identity winning just one playoff game over 18 seasons, let alone in a league defined by (among other things) its parity. This is made odder still by this fan base’s defiant—in general, and in defiance of nearly two decades of factual failure—insistence on puffing their chests and denying a very palpable descent.
It’s a bad look. Not every Cowboys fan is that way, of course, but enough are, and are so brazenly and grandiosely that way, that it’s pro forma to assume that all involved deserve this particular bit of ironic retribution. If you’re the Cowboys fan, you’re the asshole.
That, I should mention, is me. This is the team I grew up caring about. This is the team that has more recently earned me a bit of well-meaning condescension from a good friend, who happens to be a Browns fan. We have argued idly about which team is more depressing—more buffoonish or idiotically mismanaged or multiply and deservingly doomed. We both know that he will win this argument, if that’s the word. It’s not much of a contest, really; Jones’ autocratic imbecility is no match for the endless carousel of buffoons that comprise Cleveland’s brain trust, and not even the most beaten-down Cowboy supporter can grasp a championship drought that’s eligible for Social Security. Still, he understands the situation.
by Mike Piellucci, The Classical | Read more:
Image: Dmitry Samarov.
