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The Last Ride
How long is too long to let the Dallas Cowboys mess around with your life?
September 11, 2014 - 11:17am | By Mike Piellucci
This is a selection from "Losing," the ninth issue of The Classical Magazine. It's about the corrosive effects of giving a shit about the Dallas Cowboys, and any and all who saw the Cowboys in Week 1 against San Francisco -- or at all during any of the last few seasons -- understands the reasons why we're unlocking it here. You can get the Classical app, and this and every other issue of the magazine, here (for Mac people) and here (for everyone else).
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.”
What he means by that is that Cowboy fans don’t have a seat in the lifeboat that carries the rest of the football world away from the game’s monsoons. In a sport whose only true guarantee is profitability, anyone watching the NFL over the past 20 years has encountered another: the Cowboys are good for several meltdowns per season that will be notable as much for their implausibility as their ingenuity.
Dallas lost by three or fewer points on five separate occasions last season, and almost all of them were authentically baffling. A loss to Denver was the most shocking, a prix fixe beat-down that instead became a three-hour dueling banjos act between Tony Romo and Peyton Manning, with Romo gamely matching the eventual MVP measure for measure before unraveling in tragically predictable fashion—that is, by throwing a horribly timed interception to end the game, then getting played out by the usual troll-fest that accompanies his inopportune foibles.
The Detroit debacle was a textbook Contempo Cowboy Collapse infused with the fresh zest of Monte Kiffin’s colander-like defense, and enlivened by Calvin Johnson’s titanic 329-yard performance. Both were nearly spectacular enough to distract from Dallas squandering a 10-point lead with less than four minutes to play.
Little needs to be said about the Green Bay game beyond it being an affront to all the better ideals of football; up 23 points at halftime, Jason Garrett abjectly refused to bleed clock by allowing a running back averaging north of seven yards per carry to continue to do his job. That eventually gave the inimitably inadequate Matt Flynn enough time to squeak out a 37-36 comeback win.
Then, on the final day of the regular season, the Cowboys played the Eagles, this time without the injured Romo and with the division and a playoff berth on the line. A janky defense caulked things shut for most of the game, but Dallas still wound up losing after a backbreaking pick from Romo’s backup, Kyle Orton. This was, inarguably, Because Cowboys. But also, for all that newish inevitability, that is a weird thing.
Taken independently, each breakdown is baffling enough. In concert, they speak to some larger confluence, as if entire nebulas had rejiggered their orbits to ensure that this one obnoxious football team—this great bulbous haughtiness, this howling satirical boner—would fail in excruciating fashion. Which is maybe a stereotypically Cowboys-ian way to read it—we would not assume the universe gives a shit about the Bills—but is more to the point rather hilarious, actually, so long as you’re not complicit in it. I know fans of any number of teams, misbegotten and less so, who share this belief: that the last minutes of a Cowboys game, no matter what, will give them what they want and need—the experience of watching the Cowboys fail, and making their widely loathed fans miserable. This works wonderfully well for everyone but us.
***
I can't claim to live and die with my favorite teams the way I did as a kid. Those games were, inevitably, bigger and brighter, in part because of a lack of contrast; what else mattered so urgently and so much? I have no problem with the folks who still care that way, though; a part of me envies them. The ones who get a little too competitive about it, well, that’s a different story.
Sports, for these gunnery sergeant types, are less an escape from this workaday reality than a vessel to another one, where superfans are indeed super—where they know more and cheer louder and think smarter and win medals for Hardcore Football Dedication or Exceptional Fan Perseverance. This unique dedication makes them important in the fan community, if only in the way that the elite Yelp reviewer still orders from the same restaurants as everyone else, at the same prices. But everyone once cared too much about their favorite team, only to later back off; as such, many of us are a little self-conscious about being perceived as Not A Real Fan. We fall in line, and let the loudest lead. This is insecurity, too. It has nothing to do with watching games until the very end, no matter what. It has nothing to do with watching at all, really. It’s performance.
The past year of watching Cowboy games ingrained in me how stupid this all is, and in a way that sparked actual change in my life. On some level, being a fan of something demands that your devotion add to your life; it is a value exchange of your time and energy for the positive neurochemical kick in the brainstem. We are supposed to come out ahead in the deal.
And for me and many others, with the Cowboys, this is not happening. Between their outlandishly incompetent ownership and management, the drowning-to-their-eyelashes coaching staff, and the punishing, inexplicable thing on the field, the Cowboys have gone beyond adding nothing to my life—the team has actively extracted happiness from it. Getting angry at the team itself is inevitable, but that’s implied. The real punishment follows after the game ends. That’s when the anger turns inward, with a taking of account for those three-and-a-half hours of a Sunday/life. They disappeared, as they have for years, into a the maw of a team that has never so much as said thanks for all that it has devoured. Maybe I really am the asshole.
So, this fall, I stopped. I grazed on bits of games, nibbled on highlights and generally was cognizant of the team’s comings and goings, but this was far removed from my usual day-long eating-my-feelings endeavor. Much of that owes itself to my hand being forced; I was working too much, and Sunday was the only full day of the week my girlfriend and I were able to spend together. But that motivation hardly mattered after a while. I found myself not missing any of it: not the games or the inevitable fury that followed, certainly not the self-loathing for casting my lot with this mess.
I couldn’t tell you who led the team in pass breakups or get a bead on where Dez Bryant’s season ranked among the league’s best. Part of me is sad that I can’t command a discussion of things the way I once could. But that ache pales relative to the freedom I felt in cutting myself loose from the Cowboys. When they blew the Detroit game and my phone was nuked with a fusillade of text messages, I was riding horses at the rim of a canyon in Hollywood with the woman I love. I spent much of that time terrified of falling off a cliff, but it was far more rewarding.
So, what is this? It is healthier, probably. It is also sad that, in order to appreciate my Sundays again, I had to flee a team I grew up with and still want to enjoy.
It’s probably more “and” than “or”, and I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. Hardly anything involving the Cowboys cleaves cleanly, anyhow—it’s just too big to split down the middle. But teams lose on their own, finally; the choice is deciding whether or not we decide to lose with them. No one is rewarded for standing by a doomed institution, and certainly not for no good reason. Not in America, at least; there is no reason why it should be any different with America’s Team.
Mike Piellucci is a freelance writer from Dallas who is based in Los Angeles. He tweets, mostly about sports, at @MikeLikesSports.
How long is too long to let the Dallas Cowboys mess around with your life?
September 11, 2014 - 11:17am | By Mike Piellucci
This is a selection from "Losing," the ninth issue of The Classical Magazine. It's about the corrosive effects of giving a shit about the Dallas Cowboys, and any and all who saw the Cowboys in Week 1 against San Francisco -- or at all during any of the last few seasons -- understands the reasons why we're unlocking it here. You can get the Classical app, and this and every other issue of the magazine, here (for Mac people) and here (for everyone else).
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.”
What he means by that is that Cowboy fans don’t have a seat in the lifeboat that carries the rest of the football world away from the game’s monsoons. In a sport whose only true guarantee is profitability, anyone watching the NFL over the past 20 years has encountered another: the Cowboys are good for several meltdowns per season that will be notable as much for their implausibility as their ingenuity.
Dallas lost by three or fewer points on five separate occasions last season, and almost all of them were authentically baffling. A loss to Denver was the most shocking, a prix fixe beat-down that instead became a three-hour dueling banjos act between Tony Romo and Peyton Manning, with Romo gamely matching the eventual MVP measure for measure before unraveling in tragically predictable fashion—that is, by throwing a horribly timed interception to end the game, then getting played out by the usual troll-fest that accompanies his inopportune foibles.
The Detroit debacle was a textbook Contempo Cowboy Collapse infused with the fresh zest of Monte Kiffin’s colander-like defense, and enlivened by Calvin Johnson’s titanic 329-yard performance. Both were nearly spectacular enough to distract from Dallas squandering a 10-point lead with less than four minutes to play.
Little needs to be said about the Green Bay game beyond it being an affront to all the better ideals of football; up 23 points at halftime, Jason Garrett abjectly refused to bleed clock by allowing a running back averaging north of seven yards per carry to continue to do his job. That eventually gave the inimitably inadequate Matt Flynn enough time to squeak out a 37-36 comeback win.
Then, on the final day of the regular season, the Cowboys played the Eagles, this time without the injured Romo and with the division and a playoff berth on the line. A janky defense caulked things shut for most of the game, but Dallas still wound up losing after a backbreaking pick from Romo’s backup, Kyle Orton. This was, inarguably, Because Cowboys. But also, for all that newish inevitability, that is a weird thing.
Taken independently, each breakdown is baffling enough. In concert, they speak to some larger confluence, as if entire nebulas had rejiggered their orbits to ensure that this one obnoxious football team—this great bulbous haughtiness, this howling satirical boner—would fail in excruciating fashion. Which is maybe a stereotypically Cowboys-ian way to read it—we would not assume the universe gives a shit about the Bills—but is more to the point rather hilarious, actually, so long as you’re not complicit in it. I know fans of any number of teams, misbegotten and less so, who share this belief: that the last minutes of a Cowboys game, no matter what, will give them what they want and need—the experience of watching the Cowboys fail, and making their widely loathed fans miserable. This works wonderfully well for everyone but us.
***
I can't claim to live and die with my favorite teams the way I did as a kid. Those games were, inevitably, bigger and brighter, in part because of a lack of contrast; what else mattered so urgently and so much? I have no problem with the folks who still care that way, though; a part of me envies them. The ones who get a little too competitive about it, well, that’s a different story.
Sports, for these gunnery sergeant types, are less an escape from this workaday reality than a vessel to another one, where superfans are indeed super—where they know more and cheer louder and think smarter and win medals for Hardcore Football Dedication or Exceptional Fan Perseverance. This unique dedication makes them important in the fan community, if only in the way that the elite Yelp reviewer still orders from the same restaurants as everyone else, at the same prices. But everyone once cared too much about their favorite team, only to later back off; as such, many of us are a little self-conscious about being perceived as Not A Real Fan. We fall in line, and let the loudest lead. This is insecurity, too. It has nothing to do with watching games until the very end, no matter what. It has nothing to do with watching at all, really. It’s performance.
The past year of watching Cowboy games ingrained in me how stupid this all is, and in a way that sparked actual change in my life. On some level, being a fan of something demands that your devotion add to your life; it is a value exchange of your time and energy for the positive neurochemical kick in the brainstem. We are supposed to come out ahead in the deal.
And for me and many others, with the Cowboys, this is not happening. Between their outlandishly incompetent ownership and management, the drowning-to-their-eyelashes coaching staff, and the punishing, inexplicable thing on the field, the Cowboys have gone beyond adding nothing to my life—the team has actively extracted happiness from it. Getting angry at the team itself is inevitable, but that’s implied. The real punishment follows after the game ends. That’s when the anger turns inward, with a taking of account for those three-and-a-half hours of a Sunday/life. They disappeared, as they have for years, into a the maw of a team that has never so much as said thanks for all that it has devoured. Maybe I really am the asshole.
So, this fall, I stopped. I grazed on bits of games, nibbled on highlights and generally was cognizant of the team’s comings and goings, but this was far removed from my usual day-long eating-my-feelings endeavor. Much of that owes itself to my hand being forced; I was working too much, and Sunday was the only full day of the week my girlfriend and I were able to spend together. But that motivation hardly mattered after a while. I found myself not missing any of it: not the games or the inevitable fury that followed, certainly not the self-loathing for casting my lot with this mess.
I couldn’t tell you who led the team in pass breakups or get a bead on where Dez Bryant’s season ranked among the league’s best. Part of me is sad that I can’t command a discussion of things the way I once could. But that ache pales relative to the freedom I felt in cutting myself loose from the Cowboys. When they blew the Detroit game and my phone was nuked with a fusillade of text messages, I was riding horses at the rim of a canyon in Hollywood with the woman I love. I spent much of that time terrified of falling off a cliff, but it was far more rewarding.
So, what is this? It is healthier, probably. It is also sad that, in order to appreciate my Sundays again, I had to flee a team I grew up with and still want to enjoy.
It’s probably more “and” than “or”, and I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. Hardly anything involving the Cowboys cleaves cleanly, anyhow—it’s just too big to split down the middle. But teams lose on their own, finally; the choice is deciding whether or not we decide to lose with them. No one is rewarded for standing by a doomed institution, and certainly not for no good reason. Not in America, at least; there is no reason why it should be any different with America’s Team.
Mike Piellucci is a freelance writer from Dallas who is based in Los Angeles. He tweets, mostly about sports, at @MikeLikesSports.
