You can reach Rich Tandler by email at WarpathInsiders@comcast.net
Cowboyfan is a strange animal.
Not that your average NFL fanatic is completely rational and
sane, mind you. Every fan’s football worldview is taken in through lenses
tinted in his favorite team’s colors. But Cowboyfan takes it a couple of steps
further. He sees things through what must be silver and blue corneal implants.
The colors are so intense that they actually serve as bliders.
For example, according to Cowboyfan, 9-7 Dallas was “really”
13-3 last year. That’s because if their field goal kicker hadn’t missed a kick
all year they would have turned some wins into losses. Most kickers miss kicks,
of course, but when you’re playing the hypothetical game that Cowboyfan does,
the Dallas kicker is supposed to nail every one of them. Usually when someone talks
about “woulda, shoulda, coulda” in the Lone Star State, some Texan will
sarcastically say that if a frog had wings he wouldn’t whomp his ass every time
he jumped. This retort isn’t used, however, when it comes to the Cowboys’
kicker. “If’s” and “but’s” are candy and nuts in Cowboyfan’s merry
little fantasyland.
I think that the inflated, conjured-up win total also
includes the Thanksgiving Day game that Denver won on an overtime field goal
set up by a long run by Ron Dayne. The fact that Dayne made the run, according
to Cowboyfan, made the event such a fluke occurrence that it just shouldn’t
have counted. Of course Cowboyfan ignores the fact that solid tackling appeared
so infrequently in the Dallas secondary that it would be considered a fluke if
they had managed to bring Dayne down.
And then there is this illusion that Cowboyfan has that his
team has more NFL titles than the Redskins do. They both have five and, the
last time I checked, five and five are equal numbers. One five is not more than
the other five. But, to Cowboyfan, nothing that happened before they started
calling the NFL championship game the Super Bowl counts. Such news would come
as a surprise not only to Andy Farkas, Turk Edwards, and Sammy Baugh, who led
the Redskins to NFL titles in 1937 and 1942, but to, say, the participants in
the 1958 NFL championship game. In the view of Cowboyfan, the overtime tilt
between the Giants and Colts was the Greatest Game Never Played because it took
place a couple of years prior to the birth of America’s team.
Cowboyfan also like to poke fun at the string of coaches
that the Redskins have brought in recently. He conveniently forgets the likes
of Chan Gailey and Dave Campo. He laughs out loud at the perceived incompetence
of Dan Snyder as an owner while being totally ignorant of the fact that the
Redskins have won more games than Jerry Jones’ Cowboys have since Snyder bought
the team. Cowboyfan talks as though his team is an NFL powerhouse. Apparently
they have an odd definition of “powerhouse”, one that does not include
qualifications such as, you know, actually winning a playoff game. This season
will mark the 10-yard anniversary of Dallas’ last postseason victory. There’s
no word on if Jones is going to commemorate the occasion with a special jersey
or a Circle-of-Fame type of ceremony (yes I know that the thing at Texas
Stadium isn’t called that, but I do it just because it annoys Cowboyfan so
much).
Just when you think that Cowboyfan can’t come up with
anything more inane and illogical than what he as concocted out of thin air in
the past, he tops himself. Cowboyfan’s new curiosity is some sort of “quality of
loss” thing. Basically, Cowboyfan asserts that the Cowboys are demonstrably
superior to the Redskins because his team’s opening day loss was somehow “better”
than Washington’s. In doing so Cowboyfan’s argument flies in the face of what his
own team’s coach has said, that “you are what your record says you are.” But
logic certainly never got in the way of Cowboyfan making his point loudly if
not very clearly.
Cowboyfan says that since the Jaguars were a playoff team
last year and the game was in Jacksonville the Cowboys loss was superior to
Washington’s loss, which was to a non-playoff Vikings team at home. To listen
to Cowboyfan you’d think this was college and his team was barely edged at Ohio State while the Redskins got blown out by Duke at home.
Never mind that the Jaguars laid a 24-0 run on the Cowboys.
Never mind that their quarterback absolutely stunk up the entire state of
Florida with his putrid play (3 INT, 45.8 QB rating). Never mind that their
legendary coach Parcells cost his team a timeout with by throwing a late challenge
flag on an unchallengable play. Never mind that one kicker on their roster, the
one that was active, banged a 36-yard field goal attempt off of the upright
while the other one, the one that was supposed to be keep the frog from
whomping his ass, was back at home in Dallas.
None of that matters to Cowboyfan. In his view, all of this
was an impressive show of strength by his team. The Redskins, who played
inconsistently while slugging it out for 60 minutes with a Vikings team that
did have a winning record despite incredible turmoil last year, demonstrated
beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are mere girly-men, another minor obstacle
that Cowboyfan’s team will easily brush aside on their way to demonstrating
their greatness.
Perhaps someone should explain to Cowboyfan that there are
no BCS points being compiled here, no pollsters to impress. You can only lose
to the team you’re playing. In the NFL a loss is a loss is a loss. One
seven-point loss is not better than another three-point loss, especially not
when all of the teams involved had winning records last year.
On second though, never mind. Those silver and blue eyeballs
will never see the light.
Rich Tandler is the
author of The Redskins From A to Z, Volume 1: The Games. This unique book
has an account of every game the Redskins played from when the moved to
Washington for the 1937 season through 2001. For details and ordering
information go to http://www.RedskinsGames.com
