Teams That Grind My Gears: The Dallas Cowboys

If I started typing now and typed until I wore off my own fingerprints, typed until my hand muscles cramped up and ripped themselves off my hand bones like a future gastric-bypass patient vacuum-cleaning a family-bucket at KFC, and typed until the radiation from my monitor burned smoking craters through my skull, I still would not have typed long enough to list all the reasons why I hate the Dallas Cowboys.

Let’s see if I can give you an abridged version…

1) Cowboy Fans Themselves

This is the part where I have to define who I mean by Cowboy fans.  If you call yourself a Cowboy fan, you are exempt from this rant if:

• You see the pattern in the upcoming Tony Romo examples, and realize the real problem in Dallas.
• You have a real tie to Texas – If your only connection to the Lone Star State is that your uncle’s ex-wife’s father was in the Air Force and was stationed in Texas for two years, you have no such connection.
• You can name at least five players from a Tom Landry-coached Super Bowl winning team.

If you do not meet any of those three bullet points, you are exactly who I mean when I say “Cowboys fans.” These Cowboys fans aren’t the worst fans in sports; they are the worst human beings on earth. Child molesters, Neo-Nazis, Vegans…forget them, these Cowboy fans are far worse.  Every group has at least one.; just look around you…you will see him.   More often than not, he’s a guy with a goatee who loves NASCAR, drinks cheap-shit beer like Busch by the case, has at least two “Baby-mommas,” which is one reason why he lives life constantly under the threat of going to jail for not paying child support; the other being the fact that he pulls in a cool $6,000 a year.  Tattoos are optional, but the filthy baseball cap with that God-awful blue star on it (which matches the filth under his fingernails) is mandatory.

It goes without saying the average Cowboy fan I’m talking about is some blue-collar dipshit, but they are dipshits even by advanced, scientifically-calibrated dipshit standards. Granted, I get there are exceptions to this rule; hence the aforementioned criteria for exemption. I’m sure we have some non-dipshit Cowboy fans in a zoo somewhere that we try to mate like pandas in a futile attempt to make a Cowboy fanbase that doesn’t need wholesale extermination.

Tony Romo Example #1: The Airport Conversation

In the following example, determine the proper type (Legitimate Cowboy Fan or Dipshit Cowboy Fan) for each Cowboy fan.

• Cowboy Fan #1:  (Spots another guy at the airport wearing a Tony Romo jersey) Are you a Cowboys fan? (High-fives) I was born and raised in Grand Prairie! Have you been to the new stadium? It’s awesome!
• Cowboy Fan #2:  No, I ain’t never been to Texas.  I’m a long-time, die-hard fan though.  This is  my third Romo jersey! Now I have two blue ones!
• Cowboy Fan #1: Wow, you are pretty dedicated. I sure wish we could get back to a Super Bowl.
• Cowboy Fan #2: That will never happen ’cause Tony Romo sucks dog balls.

If you call yourself a Cowboy fan and can’t see the difference,  have whoever is reading this to you stop right now.  This is all completely lost on you. For the rest of you, let’s dig deeper into the defining characteristics of the dipshit Cowboys fan.

Delusions of Football Grandeur:

To be a dipshit Cowboy fan is to be completely oblivious to the fact the Cowboys haven’t won a goddamn thing since the Clinton administration, and not late in said administration either. We are talking years before the only reason why anybody even remembers Clinton; Monica Gulp-insky. It matters little if we are talking about the average blue-collar dipshit, or that suburban white-bread asshole who puts pictures on Facebook of his whole moronic family decked out in all their matching Tony Romo jerseys; we are still dealing with a group of people bound by a false belief their team is better than it is.

Socio-econonomic status aside, they are all fans of “America’s Team,” and goddamnit, fans of “America’s Team” just won’t settle for a decade and a half of being 7-9. So, in the words of Adam Smith from Mythbusters, Cowboy fans are left with little choice but to reject reality and substitute it with one of their own; a silver and blue fantasy world where Tony Romo isn’t a fully-automated, hydraulically-powered fuck-up machine and Jerry Jones isn’t just a drunken, inbred version of Al Davis.

Ask any Cowboy fans about the previous season, and invariably you will get some bilge about how they were “just one play away from the Super Bowl.” Naturally, having fans this delusional leads to a litany of head coaches who do dumb shit like run the shotgun formation on 3rd-and-goal from the opponent’s two-yard line or ice their own field goal kicker.  That complete lack of football self-awareness is the driving force behind the next two characteristics.

Scapegoating:

According to the average Cowboy fan, Dallas didn’t win each of the last seventeen Super Bowls because they were not worthy; they lost because in each of the last seventeen years, they had one fumble-fingered dickweed who blew it for everybody.  C’mon Cowboy fans, let’s all see how many of your scapegoats we can list… Hmmmm, let’s see, there’s always Tony Romo, but Cowboy fans always puss out on him and find somebody else to blame.  That leaves us with guys like  Leonard Davis, Keith Brooking, Marion Barber, Andre Gurode, Ken Hamlin,Terrance Newman, and two different Roy Williamses.

The whole scapegoating thing is why listening to sports talk radio in Dallas is like having rectal cancer turned into amplitude-modulated waves and broadcast from a 50,000-watt tower somewhere in Flower Mound, Texas.  It’s been the same fades-under-power-lines static coming from Cowboy fans for nearly two decades now, and it usually sounds something like this…

“We finally got rid of (insert overpaid, overrated, yet-still-Pro-Bowl player here). Now the Cowboys can finally win another Super Bowl!”

It starts like this. Take this opening win over the Giants; a typical early-season “big” win for the Cowboys in which Tony Romo didn’t kill Dallas with one of his patented choke-jobs. Until the first Cowboy loss, Dallas sports talk radio will be this electronic silver-and-blugasm which will be little more than a bunch of beef jerky and Busch beer-fueled screaming about how the Cowboys are going to the Super Bowl.

Then it happens…just as it does every year, and certainly during those of the Tony Romo era.

Tony Romo Example #2:  Quotes From The Dubsism Archives

September 16th, 2011:

 …As much as Romo has a reputation for being a choker, it’s Jerry Jones who can’t get Romo’s jock out of his throat. For some reason, Jones sees Troy Aikman when he looks at Romo.  But to be fair, Aikman had a far better set of playmakers around him. Romo’s had the same pressure, and a hodge-podge, B+ at best supporting cast.  Don’t get me wrong, Romo is still a mediocre at-best quarterback, but there are still a lot worse options out there. What do you think the Cowboy offense might look like with Donovan “39 passing yards” McNabb at the helm?

September 19th, 2011:

I can’t believe I’m defending Tony Romo in two consecutive weeks, but all the people who piled on him last week now have to give credit where it is due. Leading a comeback in overtime after suffering a cracked rib counters everything that was said about Romo last week; namely he’s soft and he chokes in big-game moments. Granted, he needs to pull moments like yesterday more often, but he can only do it one Sunday at a time.

September 27th, 2011:

Two weeks in a row, Tony Romo has shown an industrial-sized set of balls he’s never shown before. First there was that comeback win in San Francisco with a cracked rib and a punctured lung, then there’s the performance he turned in on Monday night, leading the Cowboys to another victory in spite of themselves. The Plowboys offense couldn’t even snap the ball effectively, and even when they did, the receivers couldn’t run the right routes, and even when they pulled off those two minor miracles, they still couldn’t catch the damn ball. With the sole exception of Dez Bryant’s catch on that 3rd-and-21 play, the Cowboys offense played without organization and focus, which is why they stumbled into 375 Romo-led yards of total offense and a win considering they never once found the end zone.

October 3rd, 2011:

With all the ups and downs, one would think you would find the “Romo-Coaster” at Six Flags over Texas rather than Cowboys Stadium. Week 1, he’s a choke-artist. Weeks 2 and 3, he showed “a rare brand of guts and leadership.”  Now, he sucks again. Even ESPN doens’t know what to do with him.

There’s the “pro” side, as evidenced by Eric Mangini.

“But ex-Jets coach Eric Mangini said a couple of Romo’s picks against the Lions were not his fault. The gutsy Romo has also led the Cowboys to two victories this season despite playing with injured ribs.”

Then’s there’s the “con” side…

“Really, you saw the best of Tony Romo in a brilliant first half as he pushed Dallas to a 20-3 lead that swelled to 27-3 after the Cowboys took the second-half kickoff and drove for a touchdown. Then we witnessed the worst of Romo. He threw three second-half interceptions — two were absolutely awful decisions — providing the catalyst for Detroit’s comeback.”

After all the hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth, NBC’s Bob Costas probably has the best observation…

“Here’s a guy who see-saws between hero’s laurels and goat horns, seemingly game to game. And today, it was half to half. Romo had three TD throws in the first 33 minutes against the undefeated Lions, but then, three picks – two of them returned for touchdowns,” said Costas.”This has been the pattern of Romo’s season, and, as it’s shaping up, his career. At any moment he is apt to rescue his team with feats of daring do, often showing the presence of mind to improvise his way out of one crisis after another. And then, the next week, or maybe the next moment, he’ll turn in a performance or make a decision that sends Cowboys fans to the ledge.”

After all, good Romo or bad Romo doesn’t matter…Cowboys’ fans ripping their collective hair out is what’s important.

Again, if you call yourself a Cowboys’ fan, and you can see the pattern at work here, then you aren’t the Cowboy fan I’m talking about.  You understand the real problem with the Cowboys isn’t Tony Romo or any of the other aforementioned scapegoats. You see there is actually one nuclear-powered douchebag who is solely responsible for the Cowboys’ nearly two decades of irrelevance, and his name is Jerry Jones.  I’ll come back to that later.

The typical blame-thrower Cowboy fan will read this screed against his beloved silver-and-blue, and will take time from emptying the septic tank on his double-wide to not-so-subtly let me know about his conceal-carry permit for daring such football blasphemy.

The typical blame-thrower Cowboy fan is the guy who calls up the aforementioned AM ass-cancer sports talk station and bleats shit like  how the Cowboys need to trade Tony Romo for Tom Brady (as if that could ever happen), but he says this crap while he’s wearing  a Tony Romo jersey.

Unquestionably, the biggest problem with such Cowboy scapegoating is that its very misguided nature keeps missing the real problem.  Cowboy fans waste so much time celebrating the departure of their “scapegoats” they completely forget the guy they replaced him with sucks dog-vomit.  Why haven’t Cowboy fans figured out that when they cut their Pro Bowl center (Andre Gurode) because  he fell into disfavor, they replace him with a guy who couldn’t hit water if he snapped the ball out of a fucking boat (Phil Costa)? And why haven’t Cowboy fans figured out this really all lands on Jerry Jones’ shoulders?

The quick answer:  because “scapegoating” should really be called “truth-avoiding.”

Phony Suffering Syndrome:

There is nothing…repeat, nothing…more pathetic than watching football fans who at the same time will tell you how crushingly great their team is while whining about how they have never won a goddamn thing.  The best fans for this celebratory self-pitying are Minnesota Vikings fans, but at least they acquired it honestly since the Vikes have never won anything ever.

But for Cowboy fans to try to hide under such a banner of chronic futility is not only delusional; completely ignores the entire reason there are any Cowboy fans in the first fucking place. They didn’t always suck.

I’ve been a fan of the Philadelphia Eagles for my entire football-watching life, and that fandom isn’t long enough to remember the Eagles’ last championship season which just happened to be 52 years ago.  But is long enough to remember when the Cowboys were a respectable rival; I always relished beating Tom Landry and Roger Staubach, but I always respected them. In those days, you savored a rare Eagle win over those guys from Dallas, because then beating them meant something.

I won’t lie; I hated Jimmy Johnson. I hated his George Jetson hair-do.  I hated his “HOWWWWW ‘BOUT THEM CAAAWWWBOYS!” bullshit.  I cheered when Eagles’ fans pelted him with battery-filled snowballs. But beating that Cowboy team also meant something because once they returned from the depths of the late 1980s, they weren’t laughably pathetic.

But since the Jimmy Johnson-built Cowboys faded into history, beating Dallas is like tripping a kid with cerebral palsy.  As horrible as that sounds, dipshit Cowboys fans, through their sheer self-aggrandizing assholery, transform watching the handicapped kid full-on, face-first eat a curb into a soul-satisfying experience; because suddenly you have an epiphany that reveals despite his condition, the palsy kid is still a missile-silo sized dickhole who rapes puppies.

While that barely scratches  the surface of how horrible Cowboys fans are, this is also the part where I have to remind you are the three exemptions from being what I’m calling a “Cowboy fan.”  If you call yourself a Cowboy fan, you are exempt from this rant if:

• You saw the patterns in the aforementioned Tony Romo example, and realize the real problem in Dallas.
• You have a real tie to Texas – If your only connection to the Lone Star State is that your uncle’s ex-wife’s father was in the Air Force and was stationed in Texas for two years, you have no such connection.
• You can name at least five players from a Tom Landry-coached Super Bowl winning team.

Unless you meet one of those three criteria, FUCK YOU. You are exactly who I am talking about. You are part of the pack of horrible Cowboys fans, who are little more than a bunch of front-runners who have no ties to Dallas or Texas whatsoever.  You are that insufferable ass-loaf who always ensures we know you are a “longtime Cowboys fan,” so that nobody thinks you are the typical band-wagon jumper from 1992, yet you get exposed the minute somebody realized you couldn’t name one of the two starting quarterbacks from the year before the Cowboys drafted Troy Aikman. You just don’t realize we all see through your bullshit, which is only part of why we all wish you would get some sort of voracious flesh-eating parasite.

But the real reason we all have an eyeball-popping hatred for you is your silly notion that you can be both impossibly arrogant and crying for pity simultaneously.  You keep screaming about how great your team is, then moan for empathy when Tony Romo dickfucks your season yet again.  Worse yet, now that it has becomes ass-rape painfully obvious that Jerry Jones has firmly inserted his wrinkly, Viagra-infused used-bourbon-drain into the rectum of the Cowboys’ future (again, I will expand on that later), you are taking that whining to stratospheric levels.

The funniest part is you are crying for pity, but you don’t know why.  After all, you can’t understand that Jerry Jones is the problem, yet you want sympathy because the Cowboys can’t win.  Ever since the Jimmy Johnson era, there was no more obnoxious group of fans.  But now that the Cowboys have become the premier choke-maestros of the NFL, they have come looking for sympathy.  That’s a supreme chunk of assholery trying to get under the same blanket of futility usually reserved for Lions, Bengals, and Vikings fans.  Those people have lived through a half-century of sucking NFL swamp-water; they’ve earned the right to piss and moan like the fat girl who just got kicked out of cheerleader tryouts.

A Cowboys’ fan trying to claim they know suffering is like a Nazi concentration camp guard saying they understand Judaism. YOU ARE PART OF THE FUCKING PROBLEM, YOU TROGLODYTE!  Cowboys’ fans sooooo deserve every bit of what they have now; this team is exactly what you get for casually attaching yourself to a dynasty all those years ago, then completely ignoring its obvious demise.  Suck it up, take your medicine like a man, wait for Jerry Jones to die, and quit bitching about it.

2) Jerry Jones

I’ve already admitted that I’m a Philadelphia Eagle fan, which means Jerry Jones has given me the greatest gift imaginable; two decades of the Cowboys being a laughing stock. I didn’t think that was possible, and I sure as shit didn’t think it was possible to the extent Jones has reached.  It’s both glorious and sad.

Stop and think about it.  Jerry Jones has destroyed the Dallas Cowboys.  Absolutely fucking destroyed them. Worse yet, waiting for the NFLs Crazy Old Man to die won’t help; he’s ensured his functionally-retarded son will take over once Jerry is in his mausoleum.  Oh, wait, that’s already been done.

Stephen Jones has already been with the team for years.  Stevie is already the Director of Player Personnel, which means Stevie is already involved with all the terrible drafts and awful contracts for mediocre players; there are as many Stevie fingerprints on the knife in the franchise’s back as there are from Jerry.  This team is fucked for years to come, and there’s nothing anybody can do about it.

This is the part where I actually feel sorry for the legitimate Cowboy fans, the ones who met my criteria for exemption from this rant.

This brings us to the history lesson which puts this all in perspective.  The Dallas Cowboys were founded in 1960.  In no time at all, they became one of the best teams in the league, they were a main rival for championships with the Green Bay Packers in the late 1960’s.  They played in their first Super Bowl in the 1970 season and won it in 1971. Even with the down years of the late 1980s, the Cowboys have never gone as long without even playing in a  Super Bowl as they have now. We are talking about seventeen years, and the drought isn’t going to end anytime soon.

Face facts, the product the Cowboys are putting on the field can’t win. Yeah, Cowboy fans…tell me all about how you beat the Giants the other night. Come talk to me in December when all the flaws in this team sum up to yet another late-season fold.

The sad part for the old-school, honest-to-goodness Cowboy fans is they are the ones who remember what this team meant to the city of Dallas in the 70’s.  The Rangers were perennially shitty. The Mavericks didn’t even exist yet, and the Stars were still in Minnesota. The Southwestern Conference was in its death throes and the Cowboys were the only thing Dallas had for sports.

Gone are the days of Tom Landry, Roger Staubach, and Tex Schramm.  Jerry Jones dug up those legacies, sodomized their corpses, then pissed on them before he tossed them back into their graves.

He has completely destroyed the dignity of the franchise. Yeah, I know the old-school Cowboys had a bit of cocaine problem, but they never had a reprobate like Dez Bryant who literally needs 24-hour daycare so he doesn’t kill a hooker or beat up his mother (again).

He has destroyed the competitiveness of the franchise.  Raise your hand if you remember the failed Quincy Carter experiment. That’s just one perfect example. The theme is simple; with his North Korean management style, Jerry has at the same time been the driving force behind hand-selecting a cavalcade of shitty players, then publicly de-balling his coaches for not being able to win with sub-par talent.

The only exception to this was Jimmy Johnson. The Cowboys only won three Super Bowls because Johnson was Jones’ roommate at the University of Arkansas, and even then, they didn’t get along particularly well.  So, what happened? Johnson builds a team so talented even that glorified Pop Warner coach Barry Switzer could win with it, and for his reward, Jerry Jones fires him.  Let that sink in for a minute. Jimmy Johnson built a team that won two straight championships and looked poised to win a shitload more, and Jerry Jones FIRED HIS ASS.

The reason why this happens is because Jones is a raving megalomaniac.  There was simply no fucking way there was going to be a Cowboys head coach who was going to become a bigger star than Jerry.  He doesn’t really care about the Cowboys; the team is simply the mechanism he uses to feed his meth-addict like need for attention.  That’s why Jerry Jones can’t help stepping up to any available microphone and saying anything that makes him the center of attention. That’s why he demands the crap-basket players he acquires are showcased, so that he looks like the football genius he believes he is. That’s why he undercuts his coaches when those crap-baskets play like crap-baskets.  And that’s why the Cowboys haven’t won in seventeen years.

The reality is that in the beginning,  Jones loved winning because it brought him attention.  But eventually, the winning became incidental. The Cowboys were once a dynasty, and now they bob like a peanut and corn flecked turd in an unflushed toilet of mediocrity.  The Cowboys used to have legitimate superstars, and now field a roster of has-beens and never-will-bes. The one constant is Jerry Jones feeding his need for attention.  Every time a Cowboy shows up in any non-sports media outlet, Jones masturbates like a spider monkey, because he knows there will yet another camera crew getting in his death-mask-like face.

When somebody goes back and does the complete post-mortem on the corpse that is the Cowboys franchise, the exact date of death would ironically be Super Bowl XXX. Winning that Super Bowl was the death blow to this team because like the chunk of undigested Porterhouse steak that will eventually kill him, that win wedged in Jerry Jones’ brain the fatal concept that he was in fact the football genius his delusions told him he was.

He didn’t need Jimmy Fucking Johnson. Jerry Jones convinced himself that he, and he alone, was the determinant of the Cowboys’ fortunes.  He beleived the team he assembled could win with any fucktard as a head coach, and he just happened to have a fucktard extraordinaire in Barry Switzer.  What better coach could there be for a team full of coke-heads (Google-search “Dallas Cowboys cocaine” for a full afternoon of reading enjoyment) and drug dealers than a guy who gets arrested trying to take a gun onto an airplane?

Barry Switzer rode Jimmy Johnson’s juggernaut of talent to a Super Bowl win; cementing his place for the next decade as the sole Championship winning coach whose name NEVER came up whenever the was a high-profile coaching vacancy. To this day, NFL owners needing a head coach line up to lick Bill Cowher’s spooge off a truck-stop bathroom floor, knowing full well that in addition to his Super Bowl victory, he lost FOUR – count them – FOUR AFC Championship games AT HOME. WHEN HIS  TEAM WAS FAVORED. FOUR. Those same spooge-lickers never once had the name “Switzer” in their mouths.

There’s a reason for that.  The rest of the league knew something that Jerry never figured out; the guy most responsible for the Cowboys’ win in Super Bowl XXX wasn’t anybody in Dallas, it was Pittsburgh quarterback Neil “Would you like that interception gift-wrapped?” O’Donnell. O’Donnell made a Super Bowl MVP out of Larry Brown (a guy who is now stocking shelves at a Sam’s Club somewhere), which in turn handed the Lombardi Trophy to a Cowboy team which has won exactly ONE play-off game since then, which in turn made Jerry Jones have some sort of self-coronation as of the unquestioned lord and high master of all things Dallas football.

And as he gets closer to being reunited with Al Davis, he gets farther away from reality. The evidence is everywhere.  There’s There’s the Rapping Jerry. There’s the “glory hole days” comment.  The true Cowboy fans have suffered in silence with Jones’s lunacy for close to two decades, but the truly frightening part is that end in Dallas will probably look a lot like how it ended for the NFL’s original crazy old man in Oakland.  You know before it’s over, the Cowboys will have a JaMarcus Russell moment; hell, you can argue that Quincy Carter was the fore-runner for over-hyped non-Heath Shuler SEC quarterbacks.

That saddest part is that you can just tell Jones will go out kicking and screaming, just like all great megalomaniac power mongers. The end in Oakland for Al Davis saw a veritable smorgasbord of NFL scraps and left-overs in silver and black, and Dallas is becoming a Texas-sized steam table offering the same awful football offal. As you read this, the Cowboys’ core is aging by the core , and once they are gone, what’s left of the Cowboys will be little more than dogshit that dries up and blows away under the hot Texas sun.

At the end of the day, the essence of Jerry Jones can be boiled down to two sentences.  Two-time Super Bowl winning coach Bill Parcells says “either Terrelle Owens goes or I go.” Jerry Jones says “Terrelle Owens is staying.”

Need I say more?

3) Just A Lot of Bad Football, and Much More To Come

None of that changes the fact that at the end of the day, it’s really about football, which, if I haven’t already mentioned,  Jerry Jones has also completely destroyed. The core of the Cowboys  —Tony Romo, Miles Austin, DeMarcus Ware, Jay Ratliff, and Jason Witten — are all relics from the Bill Parcells era.  Jones has spent nearly a decade failing to build around that core, and the end result is this team sucks out loud.

We already know about Romo. The offensive line consists of Tyron Smith and four used subway turnstiles. The defensive front seven is DeMarcus Ware, Jay Ratliff, Sean Lee, and four traffic cones. Morris Claiborne promises to add a lot of payroll to a secondary that couldn’t cover a two-foot table with a ten-foot table cloth, and to see this week’s Cowboy running back, just look up “over-rated and short-lived.” Did you know the last Cowboy back to carry the ball for over 1,000 yards was Julius Jones in 2006? Since then the Cowboy running game has been a collection of B and C list guys toiling behind the NFL’s version of the Siegfried Line.

Let’s not forget that lack of talent is led by a similar lack of coaching talent. Rex and Rob Ryan are fraternal twins, and its pretty clear Rob is the one who didn’t get enough oxygen at birth.  That has to be why he loves to telegraph a 10-man blitz on 3rd-and-short, and thereby turning a two-yard run into a thirty-five yard touchdown pass.  Then there’s Jason “I’m going to ice my own kicker” Garrett. Let’s look at a typical Cowboy offensive sequence under Garrett:

• 1st & 10: Romo drops back to pass, which he over/under throws or is dropped after hitting (insert receiver here*) in the hands. Pass incomplete.
• 2nd & 10: Romo hands off to Felix Jones, who inexplicably runs up Tyron Smith’s ass and flops to the ground for a 2-yard loss.
• 3rd & 12: 30-yard strike to Dez Bryant who makes a high-light reel catch. Play called back for holding.
• 3rd & 22: If the Cowboys have already gone three-and-out at least twice, this will be a touchdown somehow. Don’t ask how, not even Romo or Garrett know that either at this point (DeMarco Murray’s “how the hell did that happen” long run the other night is the perfect example). If not, this will be a pass complete to a receiver who for some reason is only 15 yards downfield, which forces a punt.

*Many times, even Romo doesn’t know who is in the huddle with him, because the Cowboys have developed a reputation for grabbing dudes off the street, plunking a helmet on them and telling them “just go deep.”  This happens because every single week, it is very likely that either Miles Austin blew a hamstring answering his phone or Dez Bryant is on Death Row.  This is why you can see Cowboy receivers staring blankly at Romo until he literally has to run over to tell them  they are supposed to stand and what route they are supposed to run. Don’t laugh, this happens at least a couple times a month. 

If you expand this out to a full season, it becomes fully apparent why the Cowboys are doomed to be no better than 8-8.  The other night’s win at New York primes the pump (WE’RE BACK!!! HOWWWWW ‘BOUT THEM CAAAWWWBOYS!!!), then courtesy of some logic-defying Jason Garrett play calls, there will be a defeat at the hands of either a team even the Cowboys should beat (see Seattle next week), or an over-rated “contender” (see Atlanta in week 9). Then comes the completely inexplicable loss to the dregs of the league (circle Week 11 against Cleveland on your calendar), which begins the “Romo Sucks” calls (actual post from dallascowboys.com message board: “ROMO IS THE WORST WE NEED A REAL QB LET’S TRADE FOR TEBOW HE JUST WINS GAMES!”).

The rest is history. Yet another Cowboys season crumbles into mediocrity, Jerry Jones’ cerebral arteries nudge ever close to that crippling stroke he’s been saving up for, and Tony Romo spends another off-season as the most hated man in Dallas since Lee Harvey Oswald.  At least Oswald could reliably hit a moving target at 40 yards…

4) Eventually, I Had To Do A Tony Romo Breakdown

I’ve brought up Tony Romo’s name so much in this piece that it would be Jason Garrett-type logic not to give him his own sub-heading. If you want to see Romo puke it up like cheerleader trying to win the Bulimic of the Year award, just put a Cowboys game on Sunday night. There’s little arguing with seven straight Sunday Night Football losses, and each one of those three-and-a-half hour turdfests was more pathetic than the preceding one.

If the other night’s win over the Giants had been on Sunday, the Cowboys would have stood no chance to win. None. The Polish Cavalry stood a better chance against the Luftwaffe. The Washington Generals would be a steal of a bet in comparison.  For some delightful reason, Tony Romo turns into the aforementioned fully-automated, hydraulically-powered fuck-up machine after 8:30 pm. Eastern Time on a Sunday.  Now that Brett Favre is gone, if you need a never-ending supply of disemboweling, cataclysmic, season-destroying moments, look no further than Tony Romo on a Sunday night.

Regardless of the night,  post-Favre Tony Romo, without the cock shots and the “will I, won’t I” retirement bullshit,  is now your home for the unbelievable interception that makes even non-Cowboy fans head for the optometrist because they simply can’t fucking believe what they’ve just seen.

Regardless of the day, sitting in front of your television during a Cowboys game is like a convoluted “Romo Roulette;” within the span of three minutes you can watch him hit a guy perfectly in stride on a deep post for a 60-yard score, then on a 4th-and-2 drill the ball directly into the back of an offensive lineman’s head.

That’s who Tony Romo is, and expecting it to change is like shooting out all your light bulbs so the sun will go down.

5) The Diseased Culture Created By The Marriage of Jerry Jones and the Dipshit Cowboys Fans

In all honesty, I think the thing that makes me hate the Cowboys the most has really nothing to with Jerry Jones or the fans individually; rather it is the birth of a completely self-absorbed culture their marriage created.  When Jimmy Johnson arrived from the University of Miami, he planted a seed in the manure-rich Cowboy environment for the most annoying thing in the NFL to grow. We must never forget that it was the U of Miami Hurricanes who began all that overdone celebratory  bullshit like signaling after every single fucking first down, shouting and clowning after every single fucking tackles,  taking off helmets for camera-mugging purposes, et cetera, ad nauseum…

While it started in Miami, it was the unholy trinity of Jones, Johnson, and the Cowboys fanbase that brought this shit to the NFL.  It was the Cowboys who were the first in the NFL to over-celebrate the ordinary, and they were the first to make it completely and utterly ridiculous. There was nothing more obnoxious than watching Cowboys fans going apeshit over  Kenny Gant’s “Sharkdance.” The saddest part is he used to do it before kick returns…BEFORE even the most unspectacular play…BEFORE potentially nothing.  And then Cowboy fans would go crazy over a touchback.  Barf. 

While that crap came from Miami, if you really want a good college football comparison for the Cowboys, look no farther than South Bend.  When you get right down it, the Cowboys really are the Notre Dame of the NFL.  They are brilliantly marketed; you can’t find a single city in America where it is impossible to find some mouth-breather decked out in either Cowboy or Irish gear. The marketing thing becomes even more impressive when you consider they both live off distant memories of days gone two decades by when either of them mattered. Of course, they can still be marketed without winning since at any given moment, there will be  the American sports media tickling their collective chins with Cowboy and/or Irish ball hair.  This is why the Cowboys and the Irish ALWAYS are completely over-rated; this is why the Cowboys and the Irish keep winning championships on the front pages in September, and are little more than so much faded newsprint by January.

But let’s get back to the marriage analogy. If you are a Cowboys fan who doesn’t remember the pre-Jerry Jones era, think of it as a family where the father died unexpectedly and you are one of the kids.  Legendary head coach Tom Landry was the father. Dear old Dad was a stern, but respected figure who kept everything in the household on track and aboveboard.  Jerry Jones plays the role of the mother. When “Mom” first got involved with “Dad,” everything seemed to work out fine, but then one day, Dad croaked and “Mom” underwent a drastic change.

At first, you didn’t really notice how drastic the change was, because realistically, the first new “Dad” wasn’t really all that different.  He was a car salesman named Jimmy, and while he had a much larger personality and a much better haircut than original Dad, he was nevertheless a tremendous provider who still took care of the kids.  Jimmy was  smart, owned his own car dealership, brought home the bacon, and always gave the kids everything they ever wanted, especially that year when you and Mom both got new convertibles for Christmas. Your family was the envy of every other on the block. But then one day, Mom and Dad got into a fight because Dad said something about how your grades were slipping, and he made a suggestion that pissed your mother off royally.  She thought Jimmy was trying to tell her how to raise her kid, and while the relationship seemed to survive this, the death blow had been struck.  Mom and Dad kept a good face on things for you, but Mom secretly bitched to her friends about being underappreciated and decided that since he knew so much about her kids, she started meddling in his car dealership, which was the final straw. Jimmy filed for a divorce, sold the car dealership, bought a new one in Miami, and you never saw him again.

After the divorce, Mom told you everything would be fine, and for a while, it seemed as if it would be. Jimmy forked over big alimony, and Mom got to keep the house and all the convertibles. Then Mom met this new guy named Barry.  He was a lot like Jimmy; in fact he was also a car salesman. But he didn’t have his own dealership, he didn’t have a hair-product-advertisement quality haircut, and he wasn’t very smart. Sure, he was personable enough; he sure seemed cool.  Hell, he even let you play with his gun before he packed it for business trips. Mom even let Barry take you joy-riding in Jimmy’s old convertible. Then, one day Barry had 14 stingers during happy hour and plowed Jimmy’s convertible into a tree.

After Barry’s funeral, Mom shacked up with a cavalcade of losers.  First, there was this guy named Chan.  He wasn’t around long. Chan was bald, had bad teeth, and had this weird southern accent.  He wasn’t a bad guy, but Mom told all of her friends that sleeping with Chan was like eating a Velveeta sandwich on white bread with extra mayonaisse. Naturally, Mom tired of him quickly, and one day Chan came home from work and found all his stuff out on the front lawn.

Then, there was Dave. Dave was really a bit of a loser, but it really wasn’t all his fault.  By now, Mom had turned into a hagged-out old cock-socket, she had blown through all the money she had from the divorce from Jimmy, the convertibles were now high-mileage wrecks traded in for used Ford Crown Victorias, and Mom was buying all your clothes at Wal-Mart. In other words, your life was was a giant shit sandwich; extra-heavy on shit because you didn’t have any bread.

Dave was the guy who made you realize how good you really had it with your real Dad; and even Jimmy made things pretty damn good for you. You also know that deep down in places Mom won’t admit, she knows those were the salad days as well.  You now realize that you are no longer the envy of every other family on the block; now everybody is keeping up with the Belichicks and the Coughlins. Hell, even those weird Manning Brothers who live together at the end of the block with senile father have it better than you.  Mom hung on to Dave much longer than she should have, but let’s be honest…Mom’s days of getting a good man were pretty much behind her.

Then one day Mom met this guy on Facebook named Bill.  Despite the fact Bill was one of those salty old guys who thinks everybody under the age of 40 is a marshmallow-soft puss-bag and that was pretty much why he got a steady diet of dog-shit flambé on the front step, somehow he reeled in Mom from the precipice of complete white-trash-skank-baggery.  Mom had let the house she got from Jimmy pretty much go to shit, so Bill got her to hire a new handyman named Romo.  The trouble was that Bill wasn’t a healthy guy (he had a body that looked a condom filled with tapioca pudding with a belt around it), and when he saw what a complete thumb-fuck this backward-baseball-cap wearing Romo was, his pig-heart valve burst “Alien”-style  out of his chest and he was dead before his dental implants hit the floor.

For some reason, this experience gave Mom a hankering for fat, old guys.  This meant for a while, she shacked up with this guy named Wade. Wade was a really nice guy, and everybody liked him, but he was a 275-pound wad of spineless cheese, and Mom did nothing but de-ball him even more.

Now, you hate your life so much that after you couldn’t get into the Texas National Guard, you ran off and did the whole carny thing making kids puke on the Tilt-A-Whirl at county fairs. Mom lives in this big new double-wide trailer that is supposed to look “modern” but it actually looks Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry made a baby; and Mom’s new trailer isn’t the baby…it’s the afterbirth.  But, Mom’s place has the biggest flat-screen TV you’ve ever seen; it so big she had to hang it from the roof rather than mount it on a wall.

The trouble is the reason why you won’t go to Mom’s house to play Xbox on a TV the size of New Jersey is that Mom decided she was tired of the blubby geezers and is now doing a bit of cradle-robbing with the TV delivery guy.  Captain Flat-Screen is only a few years older than you (his name is Jason…60% percent of the douche-nozzles in the universe are named Jason), but there’s something just not right about him.  He’s a smarmy ginger who keeps telling you about how smart he is (he says he went to Princeton), and whether or not you buy his story isn’t the problem.   Yeah, it’s easy to wonder why an Ivy Leaguer is delivering TVs and hanging around with geriatric sperm-dumpsters.  You just can’t bring yourself to sit on the couch playing Call of Duty next to a guy you know will be blasting his ginger-spuzz into your Mom’s denture-free mouth (or, God Forbid, the most un-holy of blast-off orifices) twenty minutes after the tail-lights of your Texas hoop-dy hit the I-20 on-ramp.

If you get the metaphors flowing from the previous ten paragraphs , you are clearly not the aforementioned dipshit Cowboys fan. Dipshit Cowboys fans think a “Metaphor” is a Ford car built in the 1950’s, and they certainly would never understand that “Mom’s new double-wide” is actually the new Cowboys Stadium.  For those same dipshit Cowboy fans, “Conclusion” also means “bottom-line reasons why you will send me hate mail.” With that…

Conclusion:

The legitimate Cowboy fan is to be empathized with.  While there are three legs in this un-holy trinity,  there is an argument to be made as to who plays what role in the Dallas Cowboys’ “team-fan-owner” menage á trois.  The best one, which is also the most credible, has the legitimate Cowboys fans getting put on the spit-roast; being simultaneously prison-probed by a team willing to shove the illusion of success down your throat while Jerry Jones puts some hefty ticket prices in your ass.

The dipshit Cowboy fan, for all he does in terms of pumping money into the coffers of the NFL, is still a dipshit.  They are a collection of socio-economic dingle-berries who do little more than stain t-shirts with chewing tobacco drool and think the return of Emmitt Smith and Troy Aikman is merely the invention of a time-machine away.  In other words, they are a bunch of neck-haired rednecks who deserve an owner like Jerry Jones; and in turn, a megalomaniac vertebrate hemmorhoid like Jones deserves a fan base that believes “I only put it in her butt” is a plausible defense against an incest charge.