NFL ACLB PREVIEWS - #11: DALLAS COWBOYS

PERTINENT DATA: 6-10 last year; 18 to 1 odds to win Super Bowl XLVI.
BEST CASE SCENARIO (Neil): Much like Raven did with the Bears, I am forced to take the best case scenario for the Cowboys even though I hate them and everything they represent. This is because Raven hates them even more. So, here we go, and . . . you know what? Fuck the Cowboys. They don’t deserve a best case scenario. Their fans are just the worst, a nauseating combination of Hank Hill style soulless rednecks and front-running frat boys who try to fill their empty hearts with some bullshit tradition that doesn’t even belong to them. The Cowboys are easy to root for because it doesn’t take any effort or true faith. They are a bullshit plastic commodity and all their heroes are monsters and evil freaks. To be a Cowboys fan is to identify with the heartless and the obscene, to stand up and wear the colors of the greedheads and the pimps who sold the world in order to feed the vile ugliness that lives in their own black hearts. The Cowboys’ star should be replaced with a dollar bill. Its famous cheerleaders all look like hardened, broken strippers, plasticized monsters with silicone hearts and Joker-like smiles. Its icons are men like Tom Landry, an emotionless robot sapped of life by his own terrible repression. You know, I told you all already how much I loved Kenny Stabler’s autobiography when I was growing up, but his wasn’t the only one I read. I read all of them. One of those was Tom Landry’s, and that thing left me feeling cold and chilled to my heart, because I recognized within the presence of true evil, of a cold sort of mechanical morality that was so severe and so repressive that it stamped out everything good and noble and true about the human spirit and became something profoundly immoral. Another belonged to Jimmy Johnson, and if Landry’s book was sort of a creepy and dark glimpse into the madness of a deranged and black soul wreathed in false piety, Johnson’s was a brazen celebration of sociopathic madness. Did you know that dude told his whole family to fuck off because they were getting in the way of his dumb football job? Yeah, he told his wife and kids that going over game tape was much more important to him than they could ever hope to be. It wasn’t even a struggle for the dude. It’s not like he was torn up inside. He just cut them out of his life and went back to rubbing his dick to raw footage of Larry Allen doing squat thrusts in his underwear. Fuck those guys. Those are the heroes of Cowboys fans and that should tell you all you need to know. But they’re not alone. Oh no. Who are the two most popular Cowboys players in history? Roger Staubach and Troy Aikman. If you said anybody else, you’re either delusional or a fucking liar. Those two dudes are worshipped by Cowboys fans, which makes sense because, again, those two are both robots, like they were made together in some lab by a team of scientists whose only instructions were to make a human avatar for every twisted caricature of the American ideal. Big, strong jaws, yes ma’am drawls, the dark impenetrable and altogether inhuman Superman heart of the American Nightmare. That’s Troy Aikman and that’s Roger Staubach. Their so-called perfection as men became something sinister and somehow wrong, the ideal of a twisted dream. They are the bastard sons of Tom Landry, pod people from hell with no true understanding of right and wrong, only a desire to propagate a white picket fence bullshit version of Americana. Perhaps I am getting carried away here and I know this was supposed to be the positive take but there is nothing positive about the Cowboys. And I haven’t even gotten started on Jerry Jones! That bullshit huckster is everything that is wrong right now with both the NFL and with my country. He will step on anyone and do anything just so he can get an extra gold toilet built in that spaceship he calls a stadium. He is corny and loud and abrasive, lacking completely in subtlety and tact, just a giant Foghorn Leghorn with a megaphone farting all over the rest of the world. He is the Ugly American, the evil fiend at the heart of this never ending horror show, and his black heart beats at the center of that greedy corporate entity known as the Dallas Cowboys. Fuck him and fuck them. They don’t deserve a best case scenario.
WORST CASE SCENARIO (Raven): I have been raised a good god-fearing Redskins fan from birth, so my hatred for the Cowboys runs deep. It runs deep. And there are few rivalries in pro sports that build this type of hatred, to where there is not enough tragedy to quench your thirst for their destruction. When they had that practice bubble collapse last year, I was saddened that no one died in the accident. This is a godless team, and has been for decades, proudly flaunting their own debaucheries and claiming it represents that star emblem on their helmet and their field - supposedly representative of Texas itself but glossed and glinted in silver like Hollywood tinsel. Their new wonderkid head coach Jason Garrett showed how true to the team he was by not letting rookies have stars on their helmets until they earned them, which in Dallas probably meant doing coke with hookers in four-star hotels and cavorting with Mexican drug lords in San Cabo. We are talking a team with offensive linemen who overdosed on heroin, or got busted in possession of 500 pounds of weed, or committed all types of crimes against humanity. I mean, let's not even get into the closeted homosexual lifestyle of Tony Romo (and allegedly Jason Witten as well), which I've got no problems with gay dudes being gay. But to pretend you are marrying some country singer or model or something, to cover for your true feelings, well it sort of fits the Cowboys as a team now that I think about it. Because they put forth this wonderful image of a proud franchise that has enjoyed success in every decade, but it's all built upon cheating and dirty lifestyles and Romanesque decadence. Sure, they made a greatly entertaining movie based off them called North Dallas Forty, as well as a good porn based on their cheerleaders in Debbie Does Dallas (great combo for a drive-in theater, by the way... how come all drive-in theaters that have been renovated and re-opened charge you by the person instead of by the car load like back in the day, and why are they such dicks about you brining in a cooler full of beer? They don't sell beer at the concession stands. I mean I understand them wanting me to buy their shitty corndogs and candy, but they don't even fucking sell beer!), but beyond that the Cowboys are a sham of an organization, and Jerry Jones is the perfect order, facial skin stretched tight like a drumhead, frozen by botox into a creepy permagrin that looks like death got a makeover on Dr. Phil or some shit. I hope they have an exhibition game between their team now and a team full of all-stars from past teams and that giant scoreboard falls and crushes like half the teams, and is full of explosive flammables and it burns the entire stadium up and thousands of Cowboys fans die or are maimed, and afterwards, rather than rebuild, Jerry Jones just sells the team to Mexico and it becomes the Mexico City Estrellas, and they demolish the remants of that monstrosity to New Americanism Cowboys Stadium, in which a real cowboy has never once stepped, and shoot the ashes into outer space like toxic sludge, hoping it doesn't hit the sun and destroy our entire Universe with's sub-atomic pestilence.
PLAYER TO PULL FOR (Neil): None of them. It is important to take a stand in these strange and terrible times.
PLAYER TO HATE MOST (Raven): Though Dez Bryant is certainly in the early incubation stages of being one of the most despicable football players available to hate upon, at this point in time, he's got another season or two of seasoning under the misguided tutelage of guys like Deion Sanders and Michael Irvin before he's a complete piece of shit. Right now, the guy to hate the most is Tony Romo - a bit player who stumbled his way into starting and starring in Dallas because Bill Parcells had nothing but cokehead black QBs in front of him, so the little homo from Southern Illinois twinkle-eyed his way into the hearts of those ignorant fuckers who love Dallas football down in Texas. Of course none of them noticed he's a second-rate QB who tends to fuck up in times of crisis, but man, he sure could get a bunch of passing yards against shitty teams! Plus, he's white! He looks like the type of guy who Carrie Underwood would write a song about! He's one of us! Yeah you demented fuckers, your little superstar is getting fisted, tag teamed, and traded back and forth by a pair of Lafayettes from True Blood.
BEST NAME ON TEAM: Felix Jones, because I have a soft spot in my heart for black dudes named either Felix or Oscar. Not Mexican guys though, because there's lot of Mexican Felixes and Oscars.
IN A PERFECT WORLD (Neil): In a perfect world, the Cowboys would be utterly degraded, their team stripped down to nothing and their gaudy monument to greed know as a stadium taken over by angry hobos who would shit all over Jerry Jones’ office and who would piss all over the Cowboys dumb Ring of Honor. Emmitt Smith would be reduced to a walking joke, forced to do Just For Men commercials as a desperate way to stay in the public eye and Troy Aikman would become a dull mannequin with lifeless eyes, unable to read because of an atrophied brain and . . . oh shit, that’s actually what happened to both Emmitt and Aikman. My bad. Anyway, everything the Cowboys represent would be laid low and their name would come to be synonymous with a sort of wretched failure, an embarrassing period in our nation’s great history. Their new mascot would be a giant pimp and their cheerleaders would all be impregnated by the bodyguards of new Cardinals owner Oscar Zeta Acosta. Cowboys gear would come to be as reviled and socially inappropriate as a Nazi uniform and all the greedheads and pimps and thieves who love the Cowboys would be forced to beg forgiveness for their perversion of the American Dream. The Cowboys are the bad guys, the symbol of the ugliness and greed and monstrous darkness which has gripped the heart of the American Dream and squeezed like a vice, wringing all the blood from it until all that’s left is a desiccated lump of meat and in a perfect world, everyone would understand that.
PROGNOSIS (Raven): The Cowboys are supposed to be better with another crazy Ryan kid coaching their defense and Jason Garrett finally getting control of this sinking ship. And the river sticks told me they'd go 9-7, so I'm not going to let my personal prejudices overrule that metascientific data. They won't make the playoffs though. Even the river sticks said that.