Tuesday Football: Thanks for visiting Cowboy Nation

Blog buddy, birder and fellow Texan expat dguzman commented on last week's Tuesday Football post, fretting about her beloved Dallas Cowboys.  I assured her that my Bears were actually much worse, and that the 'Pokes should prevail at home in Week 2.  That prediction failed, and -- deeply as I hate Jerry Jones' outfit -- I'm worried, too.

It wasn't always that way.  As a kid growing up first in Austin, then in the Rio Grande Valley, I adored the Cowboys.  Somewhere in my family album live pictures of me, a seven-year-old decked out in a full replica of Duane Thomas's road uniform.  We had gone to my grandparents' house in San Marcos to watch the NFC title game.  Sadly, that was the game Dallas lost 26-3 to Washington's infamous Over-The-Hill Gang -- so one of those pictures shows me sprawled across the couch, bawling my eyes out.

My affection for the 'Pokes survived for a long time after my family moved to Illinois.  Eventually, I did adopt both the Bears and the Browns, but we made sure to catch the Cowboys.  [In return, CBS, which televised NFC games back then, made sure that watching Cowboy games would be easy.]  I even cared about them as new owner "Bum" Bright trashed the team in the mid- and late-1980s.

It was Jerry Jones who finally got me to abandon the Cowboys.  At that point, I had long since stopped being a kid.  Going 3-13 was one thing, but replacing Tom Landry with Jimmy Johnson, the Gordon Gekko of college football, was unforgivable.  The Cowboys I knew and loved had ceased to exist.  Better to fret about the Bears' interminable quarterback search than worry one more minute about Jones' new toy.  To hell with the new Cowboys.

Since mine is a Texan family by birthright, they Cowboys still come up every weekend in the fall and early winter.  One of my sisters still roots for them, but the rest of us have moved on, mostly to the Bears.  If the Cowboys do miss the playoffs this year, we'll be sad -- not because we once loved them, but because it will represent one of the worst wastes of gridiron talent we've seen in a long time.

Fantasy update:  Score two more victories this week.  The Fluttering Horde rode the Peyton Manning-to-Andre Johnson connection to a 95-78 win over Toothless, the team run by one of my twin nephews.  Meawhile, The Middlemen backed deadly receiving with a crushing Miami defense to roll over TheSDPackers, 108-95, and move to the top of the table.

Victory Weighting update: The Week 2 standings are up.  Washington lost to Houston, but the overtime period they played puts them alone atop the stunningly weak NFC East.

---