I'm a Dallas Cowboys fan in the same way that I'm a Catholic. Some things you are born into. You follow the rituals before you know what they mean. You sit down on Sundays to watch three-and-a-half-hours of television, to tie your emotional well-being to the stop-and-start strategic chaos engine of an NFL game and its crushingly dull commercial breaks, because this is what you do and it's what you have always done.
I have my qualms about Dallas Cowboys football, just as I do about the other major institutions that have shaped my life. You're probably familiar with some of the issues that have dogged the extremely fallible Catholic Church over its long history. I won't get into them here. I probably don't need to tell you all about the many problems with the National Football League, either.
I should briefly mention, if only to deflate my own expectations before they inevitably rise to "maybe, as crazy as it sounds, this is actually our year" pitch in the minutes before the season kicks off next week, the specific problem of the Dallas Cowboys — namely, the issue of it being 30 years since the team's last NFC Championship appearance. This recent history of futility has been papered over by prior years of success now so distant they appear only as myth, and (you've got to hand it to him here) a brilliantly sustained marketing campaign led by the team's carny-like billionaire owner, Jerry Jones.
Intellectually, I struggle to defend my Cowboys fandom. No one should choose this, given a choice. Let's set aside the big-picture issues with the sport and its violence, the apparent capture of sports media by sports gambling, the drag of watching a game that has at least a quarter of its runtime eaten up by advertising. This is also what you're choosing, as a Cowboys fan: Tony Romo fumbling the field goal snap in Seattle, the Dez Bryant catch ruled incomplete in Green Bay, the 48-32 blowout at home in 2023. I am watching on a couch, or a bar somewhere, and I am dying on the field, every time.
I'm free to stop, to watch something else, but not really. Not without giving up a part of myself that I couldn't bear to see go. And so I keep coming back, for the same reasons that I still find myself in a church every now and then. You perform the rituals, you watch the games, and you believe that occasionally something amazing will happen.
I can't explain it. Football isn't for intellectuals. Or for chickens. I know how this season will most likely end, and I can't wait for it to begin. This is what hope feels like: choosing fate.