While winters frost has suddenly hit us hard, the new year is already ripe with reason for celebration. This week the sun shines a little bit brighter, food tastes just a little bit better, and a stranger's scowl during the morning commute seems just a little bit less menacing. The world is a happier place this week, as the Dallas Cowboys were eliminated from the NFL playoffs.
Here's a toast to the Green Bay Packers, who put the football team with the silver star out of our misery. And it really is all of our misery, as the folks who inexplicably have selected the Cowboys as their rooting interest are a fungus-among-us; they exist from coast to coast, bringing out old Starter jackets and reciting Tony Romo's fantasy value like it somehow excuses the fact that they've never stepped foot inside the city of Dallas.
That's right. A majority of Dallas Cowboys "fans,"... a majority you've met, anyway... probably couldn't find Dallas on a map of Dallas County. The reason so many Cowboys fans exist who have never actually been inside the Lone Star State is because, quite frankly, they're a bunch of front-runners.
Take, for example, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Tell me, how does a man born in Newark, New Jersey, who claims to love the New York Mets, the New York Rangers, and the New York Knicks, also find himself rooting for the Cowboys of Dallas? Simply, because he's a bandwagon fan. Governor Christie was born in 1962, meaning he was just a wide-eyed 9-year-old when Roger Staubach and Tom Landry won the Cowboys a Super Bowl in 1971. Christie had just turned 15 when that combo delivered a second, and he was just into his thirties when the Aikman-Smith-Irvin Triplets starting delivering Lombardi's on the reg, though his soul was likely already bought and paid for by then.
It is this sort of bandwagon-mentality en mass that makes these Cowboys fans so easy to hate. The team you root for is not something you can choose because of record; that is an affront to the Sports Gods, and in that religion, many Cowboys fans are serial sinners.
Of course, when it comes to rooting for someone as dislikable as Dez Bryant, that kind of mindset may be required. The Cowboys hotheaded wide receiver, talented as he may be, has one skill set above them all; he has an incomparable ability to make NFL fans from every wok of life scream at their television screens in unison "Oh my gawd, dude, you are so freaking annoying!"
Watching Bryant's antics on the gridiron is comparable to observing a child throwing a temper tantrum. You know, the kind you spot at the mall or a TGI Fridays. Your gut wrenches as you wonder, "Why isn't this kid mature enough to know how to act in public?"... though those feelings often manifest in the words "Shut up, shut up, shut up!" And through that pit in your stomach, there may be an ounce of sympathy for the parents of this childish-outburst. That is, until you start succumbing to the reality that the entire train wreck of a scene is the result of heavy parental enablement.
Which brings us to the alleged parental supervision over this circus, Mr. Jerral Wayne "Jerry" Jones. The fact that Jerry Jones exists defies reality. A billionaire oil-man who bought a football team in Texas and eventually meddles it into mediocrity, firing anyone and everyone but himself? It's lazy writing, is what it is. Jones stands as the strongest piece of evidence that the entire NFL is fake, because he is quite simply too good to be true.
Jones appointed himself the Cowboys GM about 12 minutes after he bought the team over a quarter century ago, and he will remain in that post until he vanishes from this mortal coil. No matter how unsatisfactory the results continue to be, Jones will never, ever replace himself with someone even remotely qualified... which is hilarious, considering the one thing Jones seems to desire more than being the face of the franchise is the idea of being the face of a championship franchise.
Happily, even with a successful 2014, the 'Boys are nothing more than the league's middle-of-the-pack. In the past 18 seasons under Jerry Rule (postseason included), the Cowboys are 149-141 with just two playoff wins (one coming a week ago under serious protest). To put it in mathematical terms, the Cowboys under Jones are the NFL's mean.
The glorious endgame, of course, is that if Jones continues to fail as a general manager and an owner, then the fans like Christie will eventually cease to be. Front-runners searching for a winner won't pick the Cowboys -- they haven't been, for nearly 20 years now -- because the Cowboys aren't winners. Jones' mediocrity is driving the worst kind of Cowboy fans into extinction. That's what we should be most thankful for.
Never change, Jer.