The Ten Dumbest Fan Bases in America: #9 The Dallas Cowboys
What would happen if every dumb person in Texas and every dumb NFL fan in the country not rooting for their local team all ended up cheering for the same professional team?
You'd have the Dallas Cowboy fanbase.
Cowboy fans are the most bipolar sports fans in the country. If you walk into a psychiatrist's office dressed in a Troy Aikman jersey, your doctor can just save you the consultation time and give you a Lithium prescription.
You probably recognize these bipolar fans as the ones that guarantee a Super Bowl performance after a week one win over the Kansas City Chiefs and then immediately follow it up the next week after a loss to the Philadelphia Eagles by pronouncing the team the worst in the history of football. Repeat this process after every week all season long. What's worse, the media actually plays into this obsession, fueling their manic highs and depressing lows with excessive reaction to each game.
The Cowboys are a perpetually 8-8 team whose fanbase expects them to be 0-16 or 16-0. They're the most average team in the NFL, only their idiot fanbase never realizes this.
By the end of September if you aren't a Cowboy fan you're ready to strangle them all to death with their Jason Witten jerseys.
Tony Romo is their patron saint, the perfect loved/hated vacillating mess of a quarterback to perfectly mirror and reinforce the stupidity and insecurity of the fan base. One week Romo is Troy Aikman, the next week he's Babe Laufenberg. There is no middle ground.
How do you sum up Cowboy fans and Romo?
By this goateed manic-depressive Cowboy fan wearing an Emmitt Smith jersey as he burns a Romo jersey. (Not pictured, the Romo for Super Bowl MVP t-shirt that this fan purchased four hours ago.)
As if the Romo love and hate wasn't enough, Cowboy owner Jerry Jones is an eternal optimist, the leader of the bipolar manics. Everything he does is predicated on complete and total success. Even when, as is often the case, it meets with complete and total failure. So Jones drives up the optimism of the manics and then, in the midst of a four game NFC East losing streak, steps out of the way, grinning and rubbing his hands together like a septuagenarian at a free Viagra clinic, as the bipolar manics crash.
This is the Cowboy fanbase, rinse and repeat, repeat and rinse.
In addition to being bipolar, Cowboy fans have a robust history of living in rival cities and rooting for the Cowboys instead of the home team just to spite local residents. The number of Cowboy fans in Washington, D.C., New York, and Philadelphia is truly extraordinary. Walk around any of those three NFC East cities and you'll see some guy in an old school Starter jacket, ratty and torn, strutting down the street, either in the midst of a euphoric high or kicking the curb and cursing the Cowboys to the high heavens. No other fan base in the country seems to enjoy being behind enemy lines more than the Cowboys. It's uncanny.
Until you realize this is what bipolar fanbases do, they set themselves up for the high of a road win over a local team -- "Oh, yeah, your team stinks, Cowboys are going to the Super Bowl!," while also setting themselves up for the abject misery of losing to a home team and having to hear about it at work -- or the unemployment office -- all week.
So what's the dumbest stereotypical Cowboy fan look like in his habitat:
He's a mechanic in Manassas, Virginia who hates the Redskins and drives around in a 1988 truck with a tattered "America's Team," Dallas Cowboy license plate rim.
He's bought the jersey for every Cowboy quarterback who has started a game since Troy Aikman retired. This is the actual list of Cowboy starters: Randall Cunningham, Anthony Wright, Quincy Carter, Ryan Leaf, Clint Stoerner, Chad Hutchinson, Vinny Testaverde, Drew Henson, and finally Drew Bledsoe.
Having read that list, how can Cowboy fans ever complain about Tony Romo again?
In the 2003 preseason he actually uttered these words, "I really do think Quincy Carter can be the next Troy Aikman."
Anytime a Redskins fan ridicules his Cowboy fandom he pops out from under the hood of a car he's working on -- wearing his tattered and grease-stained Chad Hutchinson jersey -- and says, "Are you America's team? I don't think so," cackle.
In the back of his mind he's always watching Deion Sanders on the NFL Network and thinking, "I know Deion's got a couple of good years left. I just know it. He's gotta be able to cover better than our defensive backs. Hell, a double amputee in a wheelchair can't get beat any worse."
He has never married and has no children, but he can tell you the names of all of Jay Novachek's children and what they do for a living.
In the 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012 presidential elections he wrote in Jimmy Johnson's name on the ballot.
He has one nephew, a Redskins fan, and every Thanksgiving he says, "When I die you get all my Cowboy gear." He will laugh as if this is a joke, but he's actually written this into his will. His entire estate is presently valued at $9,500 and that includes an optimistically valued Tom Landry autographed football which he believes is worth $11,000.
He's entered into that fandom time warp where fans of teams that used to be good go to live off their memories. Meaning he's convinced that 1995 wasn't that long ago. "Look now," he'll say whenever anyone says the Cowboys stink, "who won Super Bowl XXX?"
If you point out that kids have been born since then and graduated from high school, his brow will get furrowed and he'll say something like, "You telling me Michael Irvin is almost fifty? Get out of here. No way. You're crazy."
Then he turns his music back up, climbs underneath the hood of the car he's working on, and hums along to TLC's, "Waterfalls."
It's immediately followed on his mixtape by Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise."
"Ha, ha," he'll say, "Coolio knows all about America's team."
This will make no sense, but he's been doing this for thirty years now, taking someone famous and saying they know all about America's team. "Tony Micelli, who's the boss, he knows all about America's team, we the boss," he was saying all the time in 1988.
Despite his rampant and rabid Cowboy fandom, he has never been to Dallas and could not identify the city on a map of the state of Texas if asked to do so.
This won't surprise you, but if you ask him what to expect in 2013, he'll say, "This is our year."
Until, that is, the Cowboys lose their opener to the Giants.
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The ten dumbest fan bases in America