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"Dont'cha just miss the Dallas Cowboys?" That popped into my head when I realized that of the final eight teams left standing at the end of the '97 season, I hated none of them. There was no one to actively root against. After years of being "The team America loved to hate," the Cowboys became merely the team to hate.
If one coach isn't reprehensible enough for you, replace him with a real moron. A gun-totin' idiot in Barry Switzer beats an egotistical Jimmy Johnson any day. Sure, they were a throwback to the coke-snortin', filly-pimpin' athletes of the '70s, but the fact that the Cowboys always pulled out the necessary victory stuck in your craw like a rancid rack of ribs. What makes their 6-10 season especially savory is the fact that Jerry Jones still had to pay them. Ha ha ha. Dont'cha just miss the Dallas Cowboys? Yeah, me neither.
Ahh... but such is the parody that is parity within the National Football League. Some years back, the short-sighted Paul Tagliabue stepped in as commissioner and vowed to bring every team up to a level field of competition via salary caps, unilateral merchandising agreements, and big TV dollars. Did he anticipate top-loaded personal service contracts which could circumvent said restrictions, thereby creating the megalomaniacal monster with Deion Sanders' face? Of course not. He had owners' asses to kiss.
And kiss he did. Not only did the struggling-to-average teams drop to the doldrums (read: Saints, Rams, Cardinals), but successful owners like Cleveland's Art "loyalty, shmoyalty" Modell were allowed to remove decades of tradition by pulling stakes for whatever podunk town (read: Baltimore) could pony up the green. So now we have a complete lack of tradition coupled with a watered-down talent pool (due to silly expansion), creating dull games with rehashed geezers like Randall Cunningham and Boomer Esiason leading mediocre teams through average seasons. Wow. Catch the fever.
Luckily, the only good product of this dismantling of an American pastime was the Green Bay Packers' return to prominence. In the face of growing banality, they banked on the nation's love for tradition by merely constructing a quality team from the left-over soap slivers of every other team. With a motley cabal of dregs and castaways the Pack claimed a Super Bowl trophy exactly thirty years after they won the inaugural game. Take that, Dallas.
So where does that leave us, the casual user of football as a pleasant Sunday diversion? Well, get ready to lower your standards once again. There're already plans for further expansion (L.A., Cleveland), and why not? God knows there'll always be an endless supply of degree-totin', steroid-bulked gas-pumping ex-linemen to further lower the bar of quality. Just try not to look alarmed when you tune in to catch the last quarter of the 2006 Super Bowl and there's a 44-year-old John Elway leading the Omaha TenderSteaks to their third consecutive title.
Kevin Chanel is the editor and publisher of Chinmusic!, a digest of baseball and Bigrockaction. He's already been approached to play wide-out for the TenderSteaks.
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