Cowboys have devolved into America's Punchline

Still no Super Bowl appearances after the 1995 season, thanks to Sunday's horrific loss to Green Bay.

Jordan Love

Today the Dallas Cowboys stand for one thing. They are a living counterargument for the NFL. If we really were influencing the competition, the league says, don’t you think we’d conspire to get the Cowboys into the Super Bowl? Imagine the TV ratings, especially since the NFL already rules the airwaves with regular appearances by the pre-Swift Chiefs, based in Kansas City.

Instead the league has become a leviathan without much help from its most expensive and charismatic franchise. The Cowboys’ last Super Bowl was after the 1995 season, with Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith and Michael Irvin holding off the Steelers. Barry Switzer coached that Cowboys squad. Ed Sheeran was four years old then. Jordan Love was three years from birth.

Do young people outside of Texas even get the specialness of the Cowboys? What’s the big deal? The Cowboys became fashionable because they generally occupied the late-game slot on CBS’ Sunday broadcasts, and they had a newfangled offense and a funky stadium with a hole in the roof (Texas Stadium, known locally as the Half-Astrodome), and, last but not least, they introduced the bare-midriffed sideline dancer to the world of sports. Now they play in the most wretchedly excessive sports venue in North America, and they have a caricature of the Texas oil-igarch in the owner’s box (although Jerry Jones is from Arkansas). And money still cascades through their earholes. At last report the Cowboys were worth $8 billion. None of that currency is redeemable on a football field.

Sunday brought the Cowboys’ 23th playoff game since that 1995 season. It also brought their 18th loss, administered by the youngest roster to make the postseason since 1971. Green Bay didn’t even bother to unpack respect. It called for the ball when it won the coin toss and almost immediately put it in the end zone, with first-year starter Love running the show like a grounded version of Brett Favre or Aaron Rodgers.

When Darnell Savage intercepted Dak Prescott and ran into the end zone, the Packers led, 27-0, at halftime, and they won, 48-32, and Love wound up completing 16 of 21 for 272 yards and notching a near-perfect passer rating of 157.2. Second-year receiver Romeo Doubs caught six for 151 yards, and the Packers had seven plays that went 20 or more yards against a defense that breathes fire against the Giants and Commanders and ranked fifth overall in points allowed and yards allowed. Micah Parsons had no sacks, no tackles for loss, no takeaways and one quarterback hit, and seemed as menacing as Jim Parsons. He and the rest of the play-from-ahead Cowboys seemed particularly disinclined to approach Aaron Jones (21 carries, 118 yards, three touchdowns).

There is no word on whether Rodgers watched any of this, or whether he was poring over the credit card receipts of Ray Epps. His Packers’ career ended with a Game 17 loss to the Lions that kept him out of the 2022 postseason. These Packers were 3-6 at one point, playing with the kind of young receivers that Rodgers disdained, but you heard no complaints about Love, who backed up Rodgers for two years the way Rodgers had backed up Favre. It was said that Love came to the office early, stayed late, and maintained the same personal equilibrium on a daily basis. His press conference observations were not scrutinized by the Brookings Institution for hidden meanings. He got better, the Packers got better, and Rodgers, injured in his first Jets series, was reduced to pathetic show-biz feuds. Before Love, who was the last untortured soul to play quarterback for Green Bay? Lynn Dickey?

Prescott seems well-adjusted, too, and admitted he “sucked” in this one. The Cowboys have lost five of the seven playoff games he has quarterbacked. Not so long ago Dallas had finished a five-game spree in which it had put up 201 points, and a 33-13 whipping of the Eagles had given the Cowboys the edge in the NFC East. They were 10-3 and the only question in the Metroplex was whether Prescott’s MVP anointment would be unanimous.

The Cowboys were the highest-scoring team in the NFL, with CeeDee Lamb catching 139 passes, with an undefeated record and a 37-point average at home. But Lamb played a half-hearted first half and was as functional as a CeeDee player. He and Prescott seemed like strangers. The Packers used the old Belichick strategy of deactivating the prime weapon, mainly with zone defenses, and daring the Cowboys to figure out Plan B. In this case it was tight end Jake Ferguson, who caught three touchdown passes but couldn’t be expected to match the Love Machine score-for-score.

By then the Internet had already fired coach Mike McCarthy. This is McCarthy’s fourth year with the Cowboys and they finished 12-5 for the third consecutive regular season. The preseason theory was that McCarthy would badly miss Kellen Moore, the young offensive coordinator, but the Chargers went 5-12 with Moore in their employ, and McCarthy’s play-calls contributed to Prescott’s and Lamb’s numbers. Still, the wolves were out in force, especially since Jones had not specifically said McCarthy was safe for 2024. Perhaps he didn’t feel he had to. He did not address that particular subject on Sunday.

It is true that Belichick, Mike Vrabel, Jim Harbaugh and Pete Carroll are in the coaching talent pool at the moment, but be advised that Jason Garrett coached nine full seasons for Jones, and the moving vans gathered outside his home each time the Cowboys were eliminated, and Jones resisted firing him until it reached critical mass. Jones fired Tom Landry when he bought the team, and he tried to elbow Jimmy Johnson off-stage whenever the Cowboys won. That makes him an egomaniac but not an impulsive meddler. He isn’t David Tepper. Now Jones gives post-game press conferences in the locker room, which would seem bizarre anywhere else, and that seems to soothe the beast.

The Cowboys have experienced the end of the world before. They lost the Ice Bowl at Green Bay in 1967 but then Vince Lombardi moved on, and the Cowboys were suddenly NFL favorites. They finished 12-2. Because the NFL was still run like a country store in some ways, the best teams didn’t always get homefield. Cleveland, 10-4, played host to the Cowboys and did so rudely, with a 31-20 win and three interceptions of Don Meredith. It would be Meredith’s final regular-season game.

The Cowboys were Next Year’s Champions, or so the book by Bob St. John said. As Craig Morton took over and as Roger Staubach was freed from his Navy commitment, the quarterback tension was manifest. Not until 1971 did Staubach deliver a championship, in Super Bowl VI over Miami. With each year the Cowboys became more symbolic of something: Excess, largesse, a nouveau-riche profusion of freeways and malls determined to leave Nov. 22, 1963 behind.

The logo is the same but the brand is different. People look at their phones and laugh and show their friends the latest troll-bomb of the Cowboys. Each loss makes the previous loss harder to overcome. But the fans showed up Sunday, on a bitter late afternoon, and they will show up again, squeezing expectations that have no evidentiary basis. After all, the Cowboys never have lost a game Next Year.