Cowboys Against The Eagles, Get The Shocking Story!

Written By: mike on October 1, 2010 No Comment

There use to be a time when the Cowboys against the Eagles, at least in the regular season, didn’t garner more attention than the natural “divisional match-up” heading under ESPN’s weekly lineup. It was the Washington Redskins that really got the blood boiling of life-long Cowboys fans.
Then Troy Aikman and Michael Irvin retired. Emmitt Smith’s production was beginning to slow down and he moved on. The Cowboys went into a “rebuilding” period, known by Cowboys fans as “The Era of Ineptitude.” Fans such as myself had to suffer through the likes of Quincy Carter, Anthony Wright, and the Ryan Leaf experiment, while having to watch Andy Reid’s Eagles win the NFC East five times in a seven-year span.
Now, it wasn’t that it was the Eagles who were winning now instead of the Cowboys. It could have been the Giants, or the Redskins. The team didn’t matter all that much. It was more the fact that the Cowboys and their fans still had some irrational claim to winning the NFC East, to going to the playoffs every year, and to being dominant in the league. The Cowboys were the best, and were SUPPOSED to be the best, and now this irrelevant green team drafts a quarterback and hires a coach in 1999 and flips the division upside down. What the Eagles took did not belong to them, and the Cowboys hated them for it.
Then came “the incident.” 44-6, for the play-offs. Both the Eagles and the Cowboys needed a win to earn a spot in the 2008 post-season, and they couldn’t have played two different games. Philadelphia rolled over the Cowboys in every way, reminiscent of the Cowboys’ crushing of the Buffalo Bills in Super Bowl XXVII 52-17. In the biggest game of the year, when nothing else previously that season mattered, the Cowboys laid an egg. They then proceeded to fumble that egg, which the Eagles recovered, raised, and named Pride.
As a Cowboy fan, I think that was the lowest feeling we have had as a whole. More than not getting back to the Super Bowl, more than putting up mediocre rosters year after year, then to regain some semblance of organizational dignity with Tony Romo and friends making it back to the play-offs, only to fumble it away on the last play of the game in a twist that could only happen to America’s Former Team (well, and the Lions.) It was when we had the team to win (finally), and the opportunity to get back to our former glory, and nothing could have mattered more to a football organization, players, and fan base…there was nothing.
Flash forward. 2010 nfl Playoffs, Wild Card Round. Philadelphia has always hated Dallas, and now, the feeling is mutual. The weight that this game held was evident by the fact that 92,951 people came to the stadium to watch, more than ever before for a game that was not the Super Bowl. The Cowboys won. They had to win. For themselves, for their fans, for the organization, for redemption. Nothing else mattered more to an organization that had fallen so far than to beat their newfound nemesis in order to get their first playoff win in 13 years, to prove to themselves and their fans that they were indeed back on top of the NFC East, where they rightly belonged, and to get their egg back. The one called Pride.