The Cowboys Almost Make You Feel Sorry For Them

To half of your Deadspin editors they're divisional rivals, and to the other half they're "those motherfucking Cowboys," so there's no hidden sympathies here. But should we laugh at Wade Phillips's constant befuddlement and Jerry Jones's impotent rage? Or feel pity?

The Cowboys season is over while the Rangers are still playing baseball. Their fans are setting videos to Yakety Sax, never a good sign:

Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong for a team almost unanimously picked to win their division. Touchdowns called back for blatant holds. Excessive celebration penalties giving opponents short fields. A complete inability to move the ball when it matters. You know who their leading rusher was yesterday? Felix Jones, with 32 yards. (Even sadder, he was their leading receiver as well.)

The other 1-win teams: Detroit, Cleveland and San Francisco. Yet there's little glee taken from their respective failures, even for a 49ers team that was hyped just as much as Dallas. There's a sense of, "oh, sucks to be a fan there." Whence the schadenfreude for the Cowboys?

A third of the teams in the league have won Super Bowls since the Cowboys last did, so they're not the unstoppable juggernaut who wins too damn much. The Packers were a mid-90s mini-dynasty who emerged from dark days to be lovable underdogs, so it's not as if historical trends dictate our rooting interests. Yet there's still plenty of hatred for Dallas.

You know why? Because they're the motherfucking Cowboys. You don't get to dominate a decade with an unlikable team of criminals, monopolize the Thanksgiving day game, have a prickly, senile drunk of an owner who should be a cartoon character, draft and promote a pretty-boy semi-celebrity as your quarterback, build a billion-dollar stadium in the middle of a recession as a monument to a legendary status to which only you subscribe, put a hole in the roof because you're convinced God likes your team, call yourself America's Team, have bandwagon fans around the country, and just generally be insufferable twats who genuinely believe you're some kind of institution that's bigger than the game, and not have the nation dance in the streets when you're piddling around in your own mediocrity.

Yup, the Cowboys almost make you feel sorry for them. Almost.

[Ed. note: You're right, Romo was undrafted. If you think that was the salient point, then you're probably not taking much from this post.]