Why Your Team Sucks 2017: Dallas Cowboys 

Some people are fans of the Dallas Cowboys. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Dallas Cowboys. This 2017 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: FUCK JERRY FUCK JERRY FUCK JERRY FUCK JERRY FUCK JERRY FUCK JERRY FUCK JERRY FUCK JERRY FUCK JERRY FUCK JERRY FUCK JERRY FUCK JERRY FUCK JERRY FUCK JERRY FUCK JERRY FUCK JERRY FUCK JERRY FUCK JERRY FUCK JERRY FUCK JERRY FUCK JERRY FUCK JERRY FUCK JERRY FUCK JERRY FUCK JERRY FUCK JERRY FUCK JERRY. Fuck Jerry. And triple mega-fuck Chris Christie with a nacho cheese firehose. Your 2016 record: LOL who gives a shit let’s just skip to the ending: Let’s see that again. And again. And again. Fuck it, one more angle. Perfect. Jared caught the ball. No matter how rich and powerful Jerry Jones gets, I can always count on his team—America’s Moral Sewer—to turn into a clown show anytime they sniff the postseason. And I can always count on their fans to be absolute scum who are always begging to be humiliated. They lie in wait until the team is good again and take the opportunity to maximize ALL of their insufferability, to remind you just why you despised the Cowboys to begin with. Then, like clockwork, comes the comeuppance, which they’re too stupid to ever see coming. Lose forever. Your coach: WHY’D YOU SPIKE THE BALL YOU STUPID PRINCETON FUCK? Never forget that the Jared Cook catch never could have happened without Jason Garrett ordering his QB to stop the clock on the previous drive. He’ll never learn proper game management, and for that I’m grateful. He’s the best sleeper agent a Dallas hater could ever ask for. Your quarterback: Dak Prescott. Let me tell you what’s gonna happen to Dak Prescott this season, now that he’s the unquestioned starter and the Cowboys let Tony Romo dangle for three months before he finally decided to screw off and retire to the booth. Any time Dak struggles—and he will—Dallas fans will IMMEDIATELY beg for Romo to come back. It’s a lock. These front-running dye jobs are never, ever happy with the QB they have. So if they see ANY trace of slippage from Dak, they will burp and fart and talk about DCs getting tape on him and how he was just a flash-in-the-pan fourth rounder. It’s coming. They shat all over Romo, and now they’re gonna shit on YOU, Dak. The first three Dallas games are in primetime (by league rules, they must play in primetime 73 times a year). If he falters in any of them, Skippy Bayless is gonna run around naked with CAN DAK REALLY CARRY THIS TEAM ON HIS SHOULDERS? painted in bright red letters across his scrawny ass. What’s new that sucks: LOL your running back got suspended. I’m gonna put all the arguments aside for and against Zeke Elliott getting a stern dose of the Ginger Hammer justice. That whole case is a goddamn mess and the NFL has already royally fucked it up, especially now that we know they ignored the recommendation of their own investigator in the case to NOT suspend Zeke. Jerry was a bullying shitbag through the whole ordeal. Cowboys fans online have gone full Pepe on Zeke’s accuser. And outside of the case, Zeke just so happened to get himself in the middle of a bar fight and also pulled down a woman’s shirt and exposed her breast at a public parade. Not a lot of men to root for here. The NFLPA has already filed a restraining order on Zeke’s behalf (kinda ironic), Zeke is suing, and this whole thing only promises to get uglier and uglier, with the truth of the original incidents becoming less and less relevant. So what’s important to remember is that something bad happened with the Dallas Cowboys, and it will cast a pall over their entire season, and Jerry is apparently very upset about it, and that’s great. I wish Jerry was always as unhappy as he was the moment he got the news. I hope Christie accidentally falls on him in the luxury box and suffocates him to death with hot dog farts. Elsewhere, one of the team’s wideouts had his dog kidnapped, and then was arrested for shoplifting in a breathtaking case of mistaken identity. Before his name was cleared, Dallas cut him, because they like to pretend to give a shit about character when it comes to fringe players. Jason Garrett was steamed his 12th-string flanker got in trouble, folks! After Lucky Whitehead was cleared, they used access merchants and anal lampreys like Albert Breer to smear his name and help cover for their titanic mistake. I hope Whitehead sues them for eleventy billion dollars. In other news, it’s a given that any Dallas edge rusher will find a way to get himself suspended, so say goodbye to David Irving for the first month of the season. This defense is worthless without him. Half the secondary left. Their two best linebackers have one working ACL between them. So much potential regression. You could hold a diving meet off my erection right now. BOINGGGGGGGGGG! What has always sucked: I was watching a preseason game and Al Michaels described Jason Witten as “Canton-bound” and you know what? No. Fuck that. Fuck Jason Witten. You don’t get to go to the Hall of Fame by being the world’s longest-lasting, boringest safety outlet. He’s never caught more than 10 TDs in a season. He’s gone over 1,000 yards four times, and each time barely. Jason Witten blows. They should have replaced him years ago. But they’ll still let him into the Hall of Fame because Jerry bought his way in and will probably buy Witten’s way in, too. That’s how the NFL works now. Regardless of his tiff with Goodell, Jerry is still the shadow commissioner of this league, and he has remade the whole venture in his image. He engineered the existence of two shitty teams in LA. He runs stadium ops for teams that are not his own. And he has already pioneered new ways to drain local coffers by opening luxury practice facilities. This is a greedy, tacky, corrupt league with no soul at its core. It doesn’t really matter if the Cowboys regress this season—and again, they will. Jerry will still be the kingfish, raking in his money and spending it with all the sensitivity of Marie Antoinette: This is the America you live in now. Not only do the bad guys win, they don’t even have to sneak around to do it. Everyone knows Jerry has a fixer ( hmmm). Everyone knows Jerry is horny at all hours. Everyone knows the NFL has a fucked-up relationship will local prosecutors in case players—or the league itself—get in a jam. It doesn’t matter. You live in an age of naked, unapologetic corruption. No organization is a more fitting exemplar of this than the Dallas Cowboys and their tiresome, . After all, it’s not just Dallas that are out here assaulting women. They don’t deserve success. They don’t deserve happiness. They deserve to have a horse stomp on their throat. Terrance Williams still has no clue when to go out of bounds. Did you know? The biggest rapper the Dallas area has ever produced is Vanilla Ice. Also, as my colleague Dan McQuade once noted, the Dallas Cowboys exist because founder Clint Murchison—who made his money by inheriting it from his old man, who made HIS money skirting oil regulations—bought the rights to “Hail To The Redskins” and then sold them back to Skins owner and avowed racist George Preston Marshall in a ransom exchange for his expansion vote. This team was born out of shady dealings and will forever wallow in them. What might not suck: Yes yes yes the line is very good go fuck yourselves. HEAR IT FROM COWBOYS FANS! Tucker: Jesus Tapdancing Christ. Taylor: I’m a Cowboys fan that doesn’t live in Dallas. I would rather tell my coworkers what kind of porn I watch than reveal that I am a Dallas Cowboys fan. Mattie: I suffer from an auto-immune disorder that manifests itself as intermittent chest and stomach pain. It kinda feels like when you really need to burp and your esophagus burns, only always and forever. When the pain gets really bad it can even cause a physical reaction where my airways swell up and I need to take a Xanax just be able to breathe. The two things that make the pain much worse are eating the wrong food and intense stress. To cope, I’ve rapidly changed my diet and cut down on as many stressors as possible. The one exception to this is watching the Dallas Cowboys. They say losing is painful, but for five years every horrible Cowboys disaster has directly led to my chest tensing up and horrible pain creeping through my body. The adrenaline of watching the game masks the problem while the game is happening, but as soon as the game ends and I realize we fucked it up again my body goes into agony. After the Packers beat us in January, I got so bad that I had to take three times as many Xanax just to be able to breathe again. So yes, even Cowboys FANS choke at the end of big games. Shaeffer: There’s no time where you can get into an argument with Cowboys fans and come away thinking that you had an intelligent conversation with someone who is definitely trying to understand your points. Josh: We turned over our entire secondary, play a first place schedule, and it’s entirely possible Dak and Zeke already have played their best football. Matt: I 100% expected the Packers loss. I didn’t even flinch and my life was not impacted. Canon: Since 2014, Cowboys players have now lost over 100 games due to suspension. The next closest team is Baltimore with 55. Our fanbase should be rounded up and quarantined, lest we do more irrevocable damage to ourselves and our progeny. God I hate this team. Edgar: Midway the 2016 season, Dak Prescott was having one of the best seasons by a rookie in history, yet a lot of fans were asking to replace him with an old guy who has a stack of Pringles for a spinal cord and had played (mediocre btw) in four games the last two years. Fuck Patrick Crayton and fuck Dean Blandino Trey: “It is what it is.” That’s all I can say any more. Tony Romo? “It is what it is.” Greg Hardy? “It is what it is.” Lucky Whitehead? “It is what it is.” One day Jerry will die, and maybe I’ll have another answer. Matt: We cut a guy over “character concerns” that include, but are not limited to, being misidentified by Police in another state and having his dog stolen and held for ransom. Mark: Because Jerry Jones got liquored up and ruined a dynasty. Matt: Let’s not forget that last year Kellen Moore was in line to take over for Romo after that injury and Dak only got in because Moore got hurt too. Garrett would not have discovered Dak if he wasn’t forced to play him. Robot Garrett can fuck right off. David: We will never see a Super Bowl victory, hell, even GET to another Super Bowl till that monkey’s paw-wishing, abuse rug-sweeping, fanbase dislocating, cheating, alcoholic oil baron is fucking dead. Also, Fuck Aaron Rodgers. Brad: Being a Cowboys fan is a lot like being a Catholic. I didn’t choose to be a Cowboys fan, but I was born into a Cowboys family and the people around me during my formative years were all Cowboys fans because it was an all-powerful, culturally monolitic organization. As I grew up, though, I started to realize that there was a lot of moral bankruptcy and general incompetence amongst the leadership. What I was once completely committed to and emotionally invested in is actually an empty shell that has abandoned its stated goals to pursue monetary gain and the glorification of the brand through developing converts amongst expanding demographics. Being a Cowboys fan now has more to do with identifying where I came from than who I am or anything that instills pride. My kids are not being raised as Cowboys fans, and I look forward to seeing what path they take in life. John: I went to the Cowboys/Packers regular season game in Green Bay last year and after the game I ended up getting the game-day program signed by Jason Garrett (he actually signed it twice, for some reason). I was going on a trip two weeks ago and noticed the signed program still sitting in my backpack. I didn’t think it was worth the effort of getting it out, so it is still in there. Scott: Lucky fucking Whitehead, man. This team has no guiding conscience. If only I hadn’t grown up in Dallas… Carl: The Cowboys released Lucky Whitehead for having a weird summer. Craig: I often stop to think how my life would be different if only the tip of Jerry’s drill pipes had missed those vestiges of oil by just a few inches. Alas. Pat: I can’t remember the last time we employed more competent defensive backs than accused domestic abusers. But hey, at least we’re cracking down on the not-actually-shoplifting problem! Jason Garrett is Jeff Fisher with better luck in quarterbacks. Jerry Jones is a crazy old man with little expertise in his chosen field, a history of sexual harassment allegations, a habit of publicly micromanaging his employees and a tendency to fall ass-backwards into success. The Cowboys are the spiritual embodiment of the Trump administration, and we deserve nothing good. Britt: To be fair, I know at least a dozen people named Lucky Whitehead. Luke: Jerryworld is filled with so many obese, Bud Light Lime drinking, obnoxiously front-running, Trump-loving asshats that bombing it out of existence on game day would raise the collective IQ of DFW by 20 points. Our defense couldn’t stop a junior college offense and our owner has to be physically restrained from drafting/signing the worst human beings he can find outside a prison every season. Despite having a promising young QB/RB combo and a beast of an o-line, we will find a way to fuck this up. Probably by failing to stop someone from scoring the winning points at the very end of a playoff game, again. And yet I’ll still watch and still get my hopes up even though I know it’s fruitless and we’re doomed to fail miserably in the end. I’m an idiot. Richard: Jerry Jones is the Donald Trump of the NFL. He’s a media savant who knows how to keep boost the value of his team to astronomical levels while maintaining a dynasty of mediocrity that will follow me to the grave. I may as well be some dumb-fuck MAGA hat wearing asshole hooting and hollering as I watch Jerry drive my team in to the dumpster year after year. We got two lovable, sympathetic rookies who will either turn out to be complete assholes (Zeke) or be torn to shreds like Romo (Dak) despite having an offensive line that every sports writer claims is the best in the league. We don’t deserve the bounty that fell in our lap and Jerry will still manage to squander it. Eric: When we finally found a competent QB in Tony Romo I attached myself to him like the fucking plague. I made every excuse for Romo (still do) no matter how many INTs he threw or trips to Cabo he took. I’m sad to admit I was actually rooting for Dak to slip up last year so I could get one more shot to see Romo hobble his way to another wasted season. Fuck Jason Garrett, fuck Orlando Scandrick, fuck Troy Aikman for not taking a picture with me at a $2k a plate gala for the 25th anniversary of the SB winning team, and fuck NBC for putting us on Sunday Night Football this year when we’re 3-7. Scotty: THE REAL CONSPIRACY: Jerryuh won’t draft or spend on cornerbacks so that every game will be exciting. Elliott: I’m going to join the Democratic Socialists of America. I’ve never been more livid with the wealthy ruling class of this country that has turned us into a shameless plutocracy. And yet I still root for the goddamn Dallas Cowboys, the richest team in the world, run by an unconscionable billionaire who would step on the throat of every fan of his team just so he could get to a glass of Johnny Walker Black. And yet they have me by the balls. And they will never win the big one again, not as long as they have a smiling idiot as a head coach and an owner who will never be seen as smart, just rich. So why can’t I get away from them? Why does my favorite team make me feel like a reprehensible person? WHY DO I DO THIS TO MYSELF? Jose: Every September I get excited for another year of this freak show and I hate myself for it. Nick: Sean Lee is so fragile he gets stepped on at Jewish weddings. Sean Lee is so fragile Sting played him for his second encore. Sean Lee is so fragile he needs a spotter to pick up a bar tab. Andy: Your average fan probably remembers about 5% of the last season because we have the vapid attention span of a 3 year old with a fidget spinner. PH: Last week, I was at a meeting in a high school in Irving, Texas, just a few miles from where the Cowboysused to play. When logging on to the school wi-fi, I saw that someone had a wifi network named… Erik: I’m a Dallas Cowboys fan that was born in Washington, D.C., grew up in Northern Virginia and still resides here in the DMV. These facts make me an awful, awful person, but they don’t make me special. There are TONS of us here in the DMV that are born and bred, but root for Dallas. Our terribleness is the equivalent of Donald Trump, Jr. cruising around in a $250K Mercedes convertible while blasting CCR’s “Fortunate Son” from the car stereo. Collectively we inexplicably feel superior to the Skins fans we’re surrounded by. We think the Double J isn’t as bad as Daniel Snyder, but he is. We think our perennial optimism isn’t as misguided or as clueless as theirs, but it totally is. We think our fellow fans aren’t as insufferable as Skins fans, but we are just as insufferable, and often much worse and more defensive. But it gets better (or worse). Our coach just cut a guy because he was falsely identified as a perp that stole $200 of goods from a Wawa in Prince William County, VA (coincidentally a DC suburb!), and every single fan, including me, defended the move like the sycophants of Kim Jung Un sticking up for the latest homicidal purge of potential regime detractors. Expectations are once again super high for my beloved Cowboys, and I’m sure it won’t come crashing down as Zeke gets suspended and/or blows out his knee, Sean Lee tears his ACL for the 11th time, the OL loses 2-3 guys after having three years of unrivaled health, and last but not least, Dak reverts to a 4th round pick resulting in 90% of us idiot fans clamoring for Romo’s return, as if that wouldn’t result in Romo’s spine exploding the second he gets nudged by a DT. Mason: Jerry is enabling Zeke worse than the affluenza Mom. Oh, and don’t forget we drafted another alleged woman beater because of talent. And our LB decided that road rage is definitely called for at a fireworks show. Fuck. Matt: I fucking hate my fellow fans. They are the worst fans. Mix hillbilly Texans that are mostly farm hands or oil field workers, fucking bandwagon fans, rich and snobby oil tycoons to make a human stupidity soup that even New Jersey Governor Chris Christie wouldn’t eat. Fuck Mason Crosby and Jared Cook with the same bullhorn. Andy: I’m fatigued. Nothing can shock me. It’s not even boring in a New York Giants “nothing ever changes” Coughlin era kind of boredom. Being a Cowboys fan is a boring Wes Anderson true life performance art kind of boring. It’s being successful for so fucking long and so frequently that you eventually have nothing else to do but reflect on how fucking boring it is to be a fan of a rich and successful franchise, while also knowing you could never cheer for a truly dysfunctional team like the Jags or Browns because your shallowness would force you back to the Star in less time than it takes for Dez Bryant to wreck his hamstring. It means having to apologize to strangers up front for being an asinine, vapid and hollow person after sharing with them your sporting preferences, and knowing, deep down, as you awkwardly ejaculate that “yeah…sorry” that what you’re really apologizing for is the emptiness that forced you to jump on the world’s richest bandwagon and stick with it. Nobody should root for the Cowboys. A Dallas Cowboys Super Bowl win would be almost more empty than a Patriots Super Bowl win. Winning could not possibly make less of a difference to us. When analysts say “the Cowboys should be good this year!” (and they ALWAYS say this), they should follow it up with the reflection that Dallas winning ANYTHING is about as fulfilling as oldass Jerry Jones getting blown in that bar by a pair of escorts. Sure, after the fact it looks fun, but in the moment, you can’t tell me any actual sensation was felt. John: On the Dallas Cowboys, it doesn’t matter if you’ve thrown your girlfriend into walls. It doesn’t matter if you rape a woman at a team resort shortly after assaulting one of your massage therapists. It doesn’t matter if you beat your girlfriend senseless and tossed her on a futon covered with rifles. We will keep you as long as we see a shred of football talent in you. Know why? Because this guy is the owner. And as long as you’re A GODDAMN FOOTBAW PLAYER WHO CAN PRODUCE ON THE FIELD, you can get away with being a worthless piece of human shit. Meanwhile, we will continue to cheer for these people when they succeed and turn on them when they fail. At our core, we are just garbage humans who root for even worse ones. Fuck Jerry Jones. I’ll never forgive my parents for raising me in Dallas Fucking Texas. Jacob: Every time I see Dak Prescott on the field, it reminds me that I got a BA in English with a history minor from Mississippi State. I’m up to my eyeballs in debt over an English degree from an SEC school in Mississippi, where they can’t read. Fuck me for making terrible decisions. Submissions for the Deadspin NFL previews are now closed. Next up: Green Bay Packers. Relatedunderdogparlayplay fantasysleeper onlinedabble fantasyowners boxdraftkings fantasyfan duelbonus code for underdogparlayplay bonus offerssleeper new customer bonusdabble football bonusowners box bonus betspromo codes for draftkings fantasypromo code for fanduel fantasy