Time to Fire up the Cowboys’ Eternal Hype Machine Again
Since their last Super Bowl in 1995, every year promises to be "The Year" in Dallas... yet always falls short.
On paper, the Dallas Cowboys have been one of the NFL’s best teams these past few years, with the league’s second-best point differential (+491, trailing only Buffalo at +503) since 2021. However, you’d be forgiven if it doesn’t really feel like that was the case.
Sure, Dallas has had its moments, like when it captured the NFC East twice in that span — winning 10 of a possible 12 divisional matchups during the regular season — or when QB Dak Prescott set a new team passing TD record in 2021, then nearly broke it again in 2023 as WR CeeDee Lamb spent the year rewriting Dallas’ receiving record book. The Cowboys even ended Tom Brady’s NFL career with a decisive playoff victory in 2022.
But for a team that perennially comes with all the hype and expectations of a franchise labeled “America’s Team”, one which at multiple points held one-sixth of all Super Bowl titles ever awarded, it remains stunning that the Cowboys haven’t made — let alone won — the Big Game since 1995.
And yet, once again, the Cowboys go into another NFL season with the talent to potentially end that drought. PFF ranked them ninth in roster quality, saying “their stars are as good as any team in the league,” while ESPN had them ranked sixth earlier in the offseason. FanDuel has them tied for ninth in Super Bowl odds (+1800), and they’re fourth in ESPN’s Football Power Index forecast (8.7 percent). This is all despite increasing criticism of the way Jerry Jones has run the team as owner/general manager.
Mix that with the natural Cowboys’ cycles of hype and drama — more people searched Google for them over the past month than either Super Bowl participant from a year ago, presumably in part because of Lamb’s contentious contract negotiations — and Dallas is going to be as front and center as ever this year. (They play six of 17 games in primetime, with another six in the coveted 4 p.m. TV slot on the East Coast.)
Then again, that’s practically never not the case.
Even in their post-’90s dynasty era, the Cowboys have typically been at least good enough to be in the contending conversation. Only one of their coaches since that 1995 title failed to have a winning record with the team: Dave Campo, who went 15-33 from 2000 to 2002. (Neither Wade Phillips, Jason Garrett nor Mike McCarthy may have been Tom Landry, but they did win their share of regular-season games and division crowns.) And in terms of attention, just think back to that famous NFL fan map based on Facebook data — now more than a decade old — which showed dozens upon dozens of counties far from Dallas where the Cowboys were nonetheless the most popular team.
So that combination of recognizable talent, a winning record (most years), and extremely high fan interest — both rooting for and against them — is the Cowboys’ blessing and their curse. Just like in Texas generally, everything is bigger when it comes to this team: The historical success, the expectations and, recently, the disappointment over another early playoff exit.
In the end, maybe this is all just the Cowboys paying the universe back for all of those Super Bowls they won with Landry and Roger Staubach — and later, with Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith and Michael Irvin. If we set up a logistic regression model to predict every team’s chance of winning the Super Bowl each year based on its regular-season Elo rating,1 Dallas spent most of the ‘70s running hot, then gave it back in the ‘80s but built another, even larger surplus in the ‘90s, one that still exists to this day:
Despite 30 years with zero victories, Dallas is still up more than 1 net championship versus expected in its history. That may be hard to believe for fans who’ve ridden with this team’s many buildups and letdowns over the years, but it's just the nature of the Cowboys as a franchise.
Their success came so early and often during the first three decades of the Super Bowl era that anything less in the future was bound to be a disappointment. And yet, it’s also what puts the team back again in the zone it knows best: That place where history, hype, expectations, talent and desperation meet to make things perpetually feel like championship-or-bust, even though neither ever really quite comes.
Filed under: NFL
The intercept of the equation varied each season to ensure that leaguewide Super Bowl odds added to 100 percent.
The Cowboys seem to be a throwback to an era when professional sports teams were the indulgences of the wealthy and too often poorly run by their wayward children and grandchildren who lacked any real acumen at business...or anything else for that matter.
Baseball seems to have fully moved beyond this business model to one that is more corporate, ruthless, and relentlessly focused on profits and losses while destroying inefficiencies. Not everyone likes it, but the results in places like Cleveland, Tampa Bay, Milwaukee, Atlanta and Houston strongly suggest it's a better way to do business.
Not so with the NFL. When you look around the NFL, you still see the old model hanging around with the "born on third base" owner continually meddling in issues they know nothing about, doing ill-advised radio and podcasts, and putting their unqualified offspring into positions of power throughout the organization to continue the legacy of a failure footprint. Dallas comes immediately to mind.
It's not everywhere of course. A few owners - usually those from successful private businesses who recently bought their way into the NFL - bring their corporate approach with them. They stay removed and exercise authority judiciously as called for by solid governance protocols. They tend to split the GM and head coach responsibilities, avoid nepotistic hires and instead bring in strong experienced GMs and staffs while largely deferring to their expertise. They also tend to win more just as they did in the private sector.
As an example, I've been nothing but impressed with the way the Commanders have quickly gone about their business in 2024 in less than a year under Josh Harris. Strong independent and experienced GM, logical consensus built Draft picks, experienced coaching staff, no talk of "rebuilding," and an owner who is largely seen but not heard.
Very un-Dallas like. You can just feel success and excitement finally emanating out of Ashburn, Virginia as Dallas avoids any discussion of fan attendance in Oxnard.
Ironically, this ownership issue became more real during the Daniel Snyder saga when the NFL reportedly examined taking an ownership vote to strip the franchise from Snyder. The votes were reportedly not close to the number needed to the surprise of many in the media. The reason was frightening precedent.
Many of these long-time owners worried that the precedent of an ownership takeover by a vote without standards or guardrails, could lower the bar on future takings. The NFL by a mere vote of the other owners could take an entire family franchise away (and upend estate plans to pass teams to heirs) in favor of some giant corporate conglomerate offering greater revenues to share with owners. The recent limited green light for private equity investors suggests they were perhaps onto something.
Of course, the media missed the issue entirely. As you note, they were too focused ad nauseam on Jerry, Stephen and Dak - for the same reasons they're too focused on where Taylor Swift's airplane is at.
There are forests, and then there are trees...