nfl draft 2018 Jason Witten, Dallas Cowboys, Monday Night Football, Jerry Jones, NFL Draft
Jason Witten, Dallas Cowboys, Monday Night Football, Jerry Jones, NFL Draft
Requiem for the Cowboys: Jason Witten is leaving, and so is my youth
We know that's not how things turned out. The Cowboys did in fact stop winning Super Bowls after 1995, and for a while during my early teen years, they stopped winning much of anything. They cycled through coaches and quarterbacks on a seemingly annual basis, bouncing from Barry Switzer to Chan Gailey to Dave Campo and from the end of the Troy Aikman era to the short-lived reigns of Quincy Carter and Anthony Wright and Ryan Leaf and Clint Stoerner and Chad Hutchinson.
The Dallas Cowboys are America's Team, and they have fans all over the country -- even in enemy territory. Still, growing up a Cowboys fan when you live in central New Jersey can be a bit lonely at times. Most of my childhood friends were fans of the New York Giants, and those that weren't mostly favored the Jets.
I never really had a choice when it came to my Cowboys fandom, though. My father was going to make damn sure that both of his sons were Cowboys fans if it was the last thing he ever did. (We are, but it wasn't.) I was wearing Troy Aikman and Emmitt Smith jerseys before I really knew what football was. Of course, if my father's prodding didn't seal my allegiance to the team with the star on the side of its helmet, the team's massive run of success during the early part of my childhood likely would have done it anyway. The Cowboys won three Super Bowl before I turned 8 years old, and I'm sure back then I felt like they would never stop winning.
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