Last night, the Dallas Cowboys lost to the San Francisco 49ers, 19-12 at Levi's Stadium in the San Francisco suburb of Santa Clara, California, in an NFC Divisional Playoff.
In the 1995-96 season, the Cowboys won Super Bowl XXX. It was their 5th Super Bowl, and their 3rd in the last 4 seasons. They have not been to the NFC Championship Game since. Over that time, their record in Playoff games is 5-12. That's 4-4 at home (not a very good record), and 1-8 on the road (terrible -- or, as basketball legend Charles Barkley would say, "turrible").
It's gotten to this point: When NBC introduced the character of Ted Lasso, an American football coach hired to manage an English soccer team, he decided to use analogies to familiarize him with the teams in the Premier League. Keep in mind: At the time, Liverpool hadn't won the League since 1990, and finally did so again in 2020:
Ted: All I had to do is link what I don't know to what I do know.
Assistant coach: Manchester United. Super-rich. Everybody either loves them or hates them.
Ted: Dallas Cowboys.
Assistant coach: Liverpool. Used to be great. Haven't won a title in a long time.
Ted: Also the Dallas Cowboys.
Like all people with taste, I hate the Dallas Cowboys. And you should too.
Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame Football Fans for Hating the Dallas Cowboys
5. The JFK Assassination Connection. Clint Murchison was an energy company executive (oil and gas) and a cattle rancher, responsible for building the Trans-Canada Pipe Lines. He started as a Democrat, helping Lyndon B. Johnson get elected to the U.S. Senate in 1948, and was a leader in Democrats for Eisenhower in 1952.
He was an ardent anti-Communist and a supporter of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. He first supported Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin in his Red-baiting efforts, then opposed McCarthy for going too far.
Clint Murchison Sr.
Madeleine Duncan Brown, who claimed an affair with LBJ that lasted from his 1948 campaign for the Senate until he was President in 1967, including that her son Steve Brown was LBJ's son, also claimed to have been at Murchison's Dallas home the night before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in that city. She claimed that LBJ, Hoover, former Vice President Richard Nixon, oil baron H.L. Hunt (father of AFL founder and Kansas City Chiefs founder Lamar Hunt), construction executive George R. Brown (no relation to her), and John McCloy, then the Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, were also there. She said that LBJ told them that, "After tomorrow, those goddamn Kennedys will never embarrass me again. That's no threat. That's a promise."
Many others have suggested that LBJ engineered the assassination to make himself President. As far as this accusation is concerned, there is no evidence to back it up: No documents, no recordings, no witnesses confirming it.
What does this have to do with the Dallas Cowboys? Murchison's son, Clint Murchison Jr., used his father's energy company contacts to build an oil fortune of his own. In 1960, he became the founding owner of the Cowboys. Although he was mainly a hands-off owner, he made the biggest move to set up the team's eventual success, hiring Tom Landry as the team's 1st head coach. He remained owner until 1984, when ill health led him to sell the team to Harvey "Bum" Bright, who sold them to Jerry Jones in 1989. Clint Sr. died in 1969, Clint Jr. in 1987.
Clint Murchison Jr.
As far as is publicly known, there is absolutely no evidence that Clint Murchison Jr. had anything to do with the JFK assassination. Indeed, the fact that H.L. Hunt is alleged to have been involved helps to clear Murchison Jr.: He and Hunt's son Lamar were at odds in the attempt to bring the NFL to Dallas, and, while most NFL team owners tend to be friends with most of the others, the younger Murchison and the younger Hunt were never close.
So if there was a conspiracy, and Murchison Sr. was involved, it's unlikely that Murchison Jr. was. Still, father and son were close, so the son may have known something, and refused to report it. This would mean that the founder of the Dallas Cowboys had some involvement, casting a shadow over the team forevermore. But since the evidence for this one is very slim, I can only put it at number 5.
4. Hypocrisy. Texas Stadium, based in suburban Irving, Texas, was the Cowboys' home from 1971 to 2008. It had a roof that covered the seating areas, but not the field. In other words, there was a hole in the roof. Cowboy fans joked it was there "so that God could look down on his favorite team."
I called it the Hole Bowl.
If God cared who won a sporting event, the Cowboys would never have gotten into a Super Bowl.
Landry was known as "God's Coach." He spoke of morality and values, and looked like he walked his talk. But his players? They embodied the Seven Deadly Sins. Maybe legendary Roger Staubach was only guilty of Pride, but plenty of Landry's other players were guilty of Envy, Greed, Wrath, Gluttony, Sloth and Lust. Both the 1970s and the 1990s Cowboys got caught with cocaine enough times that they could be called both "South America's Team" and "America's Most Wanted Team."
Tom Landry
If you want to see the best example of Cowboy hypocrisy, it was linebacker Thomas "Hollywood" Henderson. Before Super Bowl XIII, he jumped on the perception that Steeler quarterback Terry Bradshaw -- who was already 2-for-2 in Super Bowls -- was dumb. He said, "Terry Bradshaw couldn't spell 'cat' if you spotted him on the C and the A." He also said the Cowboys would win, 31-0.
He was half-right about the score: The Steelers won, 35-31, and Bradshaw was named the game's MVP. He told the media, "Ask Hollywood how dumb I am now." Henderson looked like the dummy. He never publicly questioned anyone's intelligence again.
3. Dallas, and What the City Represents. In 2011, Chad Millman and Shawn Coyne published The Ones Who Hit the Hardest: The Steelers, the Cowboys, the '70s, and the Battle for America's Soul. It does a terrific job of telling the cultural histories of both Pittsburgh and Dallas, and the teams that played in those cities, including their meeting in Super Bowl X in 1976, up until their meeting in Super Bowl XIII in 1979. The problem is, the book ends with the postgame of that Super Bowl, and doesn't really explain who won "the battle for America's soul."
Indeed, while the Seventies Steelers are now regarded as one of the greatest football teams of all time, and the Seventies Cowboys are a level below them, looking at America from the Eighties onward, we have become much more like Dallas and the Cowboys than we have like Pittsburgh and the Steelers:
* Pittsburgh: Hard-working, patient, team-oriented, letting your performance do the talking, magnanimous in victory, appreciative of the people who got us there.
* Dallas: Materialistic, glitzy, self-indulgent, instant-gratification-seeking, trash-talking, drug-ridden, yet sanctimonious about religion.
AT&T Stadium in Arlington. Also known as
the Palace in Dallas, Jerry World, and the Death Star.
Even the rest of Texas hates Dallas, because of what it represents. It's not just oil, which also dominates Houston, which is the biggest city in Texas. Dallas is also home to major banks, and major insurance companies, which people hate. It's home to 2 transportation companies that are unpopular: American Airlines and Greyhound. Take a look at a Greyhound bus, and you'll find that every single one of them has Texas license plates.
Admit it: You're hearing the theme song
As Bum Phillips, a native of Orange, in the State's southeastern corner, and head coach of the Houston Oilers from 1975 to 1980, put it, "The Cowboys are 'America's Team,' but the Oilers are Texas' team."
Of course, that's not true. Texas has always been a front-running State. And if the Oilers ever were more popular, that ended with their move to Tennessee after the 1996 season. The arrival of the Houston Texans in 2002 has done little to prevent that: From the 2002 season onward, the Cowboys' Playoff record is 4-9, while the Texans' is 4-6, which is better, but the Texans have never been more popular than the Cowboys in the State overall.
2. Overexposure. In the 1970s and '80s, they seemed to be on CBS so often, people begin to wonder if the Network's initials stood for Cowboys Broadcasting System. Like the Steelers, the Miami Dolphins, and the Oakland Raiders, the Cowboys gained a national following, because some of America's biggest TV markets didn't have much success.
Indeed, between the seasons of 1964 and 1979, as the "Baby Boom" generation came of age (including being old enough to drink and watch football games in bars, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, New England and Atlanta, home to around 60 million people combined, reached the Conference Championship Game exactly never. (The Chicago Bears won the 1963 NFL Championship Game, which the Philadelphia Eagles won the 1980 NFC Championship, losing Super Bowl XV to the Oakland Raiders in early 1981.)
Over that same stretch, the Cowboys reached 11 NFL or NFC Championship Games; while the AFL or AFC Championship Game was reached by the Raiders 8 times, the Steelers 5, the Dolphins 3; the Cowboys got into 5 Super Bowls, the Steelers 4, the Dolphins 3, the Raiders 2.
The NFC East was created in 1970. From then until 1978, it was never won by the New York Giants or the Philadelphia Eagles, won by the Washington Redskins and the football version of the St. Louis Cardinals once each, and by the Cowboys 7 times.
It's no secret that the most popular team, nationwide, in any sports league, is usually the most successful, and has even more people who hate them: The New York Yankees in baseball, the Boston Celtics in basketball, the Detroit Red Wings among American hockey fans, Notre Dame in college football, Duke in college basketball. In international soccer, Manchester United in Britain, Real Madrid in Spain, Bayern Munich in Germany, Juventus in Italy.
The New England Patriots may have surpassed the Cowboys in terms of success -- and, in perception, for the same reason, cheating (or "cheating") -- but it doesn't change the fact that the Cowboys are still more hated than the Pats.
1. The Myth of "America's Team." The term came in 1979, after Super Bowl XIII, when NFL Films gave the name as the title of the Cowboys' 1978 highlight film.
America's Team? There was never an election. Maybe the Cowboys were the most popular, but not net, when you consider hatred. The Steelers (6 Super Bowls, tied with the cheating Patriots for the most) and the Green Bay Packers (13 NFL Championships, counting pre-Super Bowl titles, easily the most) are the real contenders for that title.
There are 32 teams in the National Football League, and it is next to impossible to get the fans of 31 of them to agree on anything. But fans of 31 teams agree on this one thing: Dallas sucks.
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