Well, at the time (1978-79), they'd won only two Super Bowls, had no pre-merger NFL titles (Hell, they weren't even established until 1960- much too young for that kind of media hype), and were better known for selling jerseys and filling stadiums than for winning Super Bowls. I'd have called them Hollywood's team, for both their glamorous uniforms and their sense of entitlement as well as for the nickname of their spiritual leader (a leader who found out that Terry Bradshaw can spell "cat"). Ten-gallon hats, shiny belt buckles and metallic color schemes don't an America's Team make. I'd have awarded that title to the Packers, the Browns or the (Baltimore) Colts. Maybe even the Jets for their work in putting lie to the myth of NFL superiority.
That's silly though - they earned the nickname because everyone adopted them as their team - Cowboys fans were all over the country regardless of whether they had a team in their hometown or not. As a Texan and a Cowboy fan I thought it was pretty ridiculous how many "ManU-esque" front-runner fans they had.
The same could be said about the Steelers and Raiders, but bling isn't their thing. The two aren't comparable. There are so many teams in England that it matters where you're born. You almost have a responsibility to support the team closest to you, even tho they may never amount to anything worthy of your support. They really needed to revamp that FA system so there wouldn't be so many fans with nothing to hope for, ever. Here, in a country with nearly as much land area as Europe and only 32 teams (28 when the media bestowed this title on the Cowboys), you should be free to choose without risking negative comment unless you live in an actual NFL city. I live about the same distance from New Orleans that I do from Cincinnati, but I've been a Steeler fan since John Stallworth joined the League. Should I now support the Titans because they're 90 miles away? The Falcons because they're closer (and are now winning more than Pittsburgh)? No.
I don't think the Steelers or Raiders had anything like the Cowboys National fandom. I get in a lot of arguments with my friend who is from NY and is a Steelers fan since he was a kid. Fandom is really a personal thing - but the ManU reference is about all the so-called "plastics" like in this country who became fans just because they were winning. I agree that you should be free to choose whoever you want to root for, as long as you aren't a glory hound. Don't be defensive.
Starr is one of the most overrated quarterbacks in the history of the NFL. Alex Smith reminds me of Starr. Both game mangers. Starr was surrounded with a great team. Jim Taylor and Horning and then Pitts and Anderson in the backfield. He, Griese and Dawson were all cut of the same cloth.
Bart Starr's stat line for the playoffs: 130/201, 1,753 yards (8.23 per attempt), 15 TDs, 3 TDs... 104.8 average rating. That, and being MVP of the first two Superbowls makes it kind of hard to argue with, particularly as it was nowhere near as 'QB-centric' a game as it is now. He was also consistently excellent with them, only having one game below an 85 rating, and six above 100... in the 60s! The guy had as much 'clutch' as anyone to ever play the game, basically. Though I get the gist of where you are coming from there is a big, big difference between that and Alex Smith. Bob Griese's average playoff rating was 68.3. Len Dawson's was 77.4. Frank Tarkenton (who played on an extremely talented team also) had a post-season rating of 58.6. As a matter of fact, Starr's playoff rating is better than anybody's post-merger apart from one, who is only rated 00.1 better... Aaron Rodgers. --- The masturbation over Ryan continued tonight... hammering on about how "wonderful, flawless" he is RIGHT before he gives up a CRUCIAL fumble and completely ignoring the irony after. Then saying how "stopping Ryan in four-down mode is basically impossible" - when that is EXACTLY what the Jets did to end the first half (five downs, actually!). Some really, really top handing off... and YES!! The "Matty Ice" moniker makes yet another unjustified comeback...their best gains were made on the ground/penalties, and he nearly threw a pick in the red zone right at the end. He did a marvellous job handing the ball off to Jacquizz Rogers for two of those touchdowns mind. Geno Smith says ha f***ing ha. Because they did an excellent job of fellating Ryan hard enough to forget that the rookie, on the road, went 16/20 for 200yds and 3 TDs, and actually did play a huge role in their game-winning drive. Also llllooovvveeee how the Jets kept getting called for what Belichick was dubbed a "genius" for last week, n terms of stopping Gonzalez.
I assume that that is a response to my post, but I don't see how it relates? The question, which admittedly I fabricated out of a comment, had to do with which old-timers would have profited most from today's rules, not how great they were... Of course I think you are underrating Starr, Griese, and Dawson here-- there really wasn't any such thing as game management as we understand it today. Starr's signature was going deep on second and one, which is hardly a game management practice. Dawson ran a whole, whole lot of quarterback draws. Griese kept Paul Warfield plenty happy on a team loaded with running backs... Or to put it another way-- a game manager as I understand the term is a player of ordinary talent who focuses on protecting the ball and moving the sticks, in that order. This does not necessarily mean a guy who moves the sticks and doesn't turn the ball over is only a game manager-- both those things are as desirable for John Elway as for Jason Campbell.
Actually I thought Ryan played pretty well tonight. His O-line sucks at pass protection-- they are built to gimmick block for big backs on first and second downs, and they didn't have any big backs tonight. The fumble was on the pass protection-- really, who in the league would have held the ball in the face of a breakdown of that proportion? Atlanta can't give him more than a two-and-a-half count to throw, can't keep the defense off the field, can't run for short yardage, Roddy White was terrible-- and he still got them the lead on his last possession. Those two handoffs for tds were both good reads, BTW. You could actually hear him using different terminology on the first one-- I'm pretty sure he was calling something from outside the game plan when he saw the Jet safeties so deep and so split... The Jets are just gaining on their flaws by leaps and bounds. That's a much, much better team then they were three weeks ago-- and Atlanta is not. And Mike Smith keeps going for it on fourth and short, and keeps paying for it. They ought to dock his pay ten grand each time he tries it.
Plenty of people respected the Dallas players, myself included, but calling all or most of them fans because a very good team in a big market city with famous cheerleaders was on TV every week is a stretch. I'd agree that Dallas generated interest, but they did so deliberately and with the help of a league that cared more about money than rewarding success (Pittsburgh is a smaller market than Dallas. Oakland and Green Bay are as well). Nothing to be defensive about- just making comment about the folly of discussing who lives where and supports whom in an American sport in the USA. It's funny that you mention United, because they're exactly what comes to mind when I think of the Cowboys hype. But they're more like Bayern Munich resultswise. I think of the Super Bowl era Steelers as Real Madrid, but without the hype or arrogance.
One aspect of "America's Team" that noone has mentioned is that Dallas had as many haters outside of Texas as they had fans. Which in some ways sort of supported the designation; people had an opinion about it, whereas marketing the Cardinals as "America's team" would have mostly raised a warm round of indifference. In the 60's Green Bay was de facto America's team (no quotes) because CBS made conscious decision that they would be the home team for small town America if there was no other team in the region; so Boise and Medford and Lincoln and Lubbock and Jackson and so on all saw the Packers week in and week out. But of course, the Cowboys were the team that the Packers had to beat more often than not, which made them familiar when the Packers' string ran out, and when America began to perceive itself outside the small-town model. Partly the Cowboys were hated because they were whipping on the hometown teams all too regularly; but the Packers and the Browns and Bears and Colts did likewise at times without drawing as bitter a reaction. More to the point, Tom Landry kind of made the Cowboys the symbol of unfeeling corporate sports management. Where Lombardi tried to head off personality conflicts by making the Packers an extended family/church congregation, Landry tried to use personality tests too weed out guys who had too much personality. Lombardi more or less teflonned out of things like trading players who hired agents, but Landry was perceived as seeking cogs for a machine and became a kind of anti-counter-culture symbol-- which made him more popular among the anti-hippie, anti-civil rights types, and more high profile albeit not popular among the young and long-haired. (Of course neither approach worked particularly well-- Hornung still got busted and Steve Wright and Max McGee still wouldn't toe Lombardi's line, and Landry still wound up with Hollywood Henderson and Lance Rentzel in his shop.) (To be fair to Lombardi, he did more or less by force of will make Green Bay a haven for black players, and in that sense probably deserved extra credit from the counterculture fringe.)
He really wasn't that bad last night. No running game, one receiver hurt and a couple of drops. Just keep in mind, he left the field last night after he put his team in the lead. You can say he did his job last night. I say that as a Jet fan.
Oh no he wasn't bad don't get me wrong, but he also was not excellent - I'm just sick of hearing all the non-stop, defiant hype in the face of everything else from commentators whenever he is playing. I don't mind him, but also don't rank the guy anywhere NEAR the top. His pass protection wasn't good last night, but was a lot better than what say Rodgers had last year, but Rodgers still produced an amazing season (and with a worse running game and banged up receivers). Ryan benefits hugely from the talent around him, yet the hype train almost tries to ignore that as much as possible to keep promoting the guy, it's maddening. He's not close to the best in his division, he wasn't the best (or the most clutch) in his draft class, and he wasn't even the best QB last night... but facts like the latter two are constantly brushed under the carpet, while sometimes they even have the gall to try and question the first part. It's mind-numbing at times, to be honest.
Not sure how any of us can prove or disprove the statement in your first sentence, but Cowboys fans were on evidence everywhere they went and lots of folks outside of NFL cities adopted them as their team. My memory is that while there were definitely haters, it was much more of a Jordan situation than Lebron.
It's sort of hard to compare NFL to European football when luck of the draw plays a much bigger part in the NFL. Real Madrid is about the last team I would think of when it comes to the Steelers though.
For sure-- perhaps I should have made it clearer that I agree completely with the above. But everywhere I went-- Boise, Lake Placid, the central Adirondacks, central Mohawk Valley, Manhattan, Boston, Rochester, Charlottesville-- it seemed like the Cowboys were also the most common least favorite team...
It's not difficult to compare when the teams in the discussion are there to win. Munich doesn't care about semis, nor do United, or Barca or Madrid. They care about winning it all. I don't agree that the draw plays all that much of a role, but I guess that's because I tend to look at the end of the NFL season as being divided into two groups: the Super Bowl champion and the other 31 teams in the league. The 1995 and 2010 AFC titles are stats I bring up from time to time, but I don't hold those teams closer to the heart than this current 2013 team (which will not reach the postseason, likely) because the only goal is to win the Super Bowl. IMO the draw likely never kept a troo contenda from earning a postseason berth- it just means that the sort of fans who take pride in great playoff runs that do not end in championships will be happier to play, say, Atlanta in the first round than Seattle. If we're going back to leather helmets over the league's total history, I agree. That would go to the Pack or Giants, whoever's got more titles, I guess. But in the Super Bowl era? That's pretty much exactly who the Steelers are, with more Lombardis, just like RM has nine European/Champions League trophies. Now, you could take UEFA and separate it by champions only v. x number of teams per league as we do the pre and post-merger NFL, but even there, six titles in the last 39 seasons puts the Steelers atop any modern list. When I lived in DC, Colts fans and the Washington team's fans hated them. Pittsburgh fans hated them to whatever degree you can hate a team that you've (at the time) played twice in Super Bowls and beaten twice. When I lived in Atlanta, Falcons fans hated them for the 1980 postseason. When I returned to Alabama, I found that a lot of people here loved them because of Tom Landry and Roger Staubach and Lee Roy Jordan (I think they saw a better Bryant in Landry and a better Steadman Shealy or Jay Barker in Staubach). Dallas traditionally has inspired more hate than indifference among nonfans, which is as good for hype as having a bunch of fans spread out across the country. Pittsburgh hasn't managed to do that. The Steelers, over the decades, have been portrayed as blue-collar and hard-nosed (whether they really are more so than other NFL teams is up for debate, but I think the portrayal exists. I also think it's an extension of the city itself). Not exactly something to hate on in this game.
By luck of the draw I mean salary caps, good draft picks, and a host of other factors make it much harder for any NFL team to maintain the kind of success that European soccer teams do. Real Madrid can fairly easily castoff players that don't work for them and buy new ones. The Steelers are one of the smartest franchises out there, but without Roethlisberger panning out so well early, they might have fewer titles. And as smart as they are, they still are 0-4 and likely to miss the playoffs. This would never happen to the Real Madrid's of the world. From a title perspective only I guess you can make the case for the analogy - but from a playing style, star player personality and profile, and branding perspective, I don't think the analogy works that well. Pittsburgh seems more of a team first, hard working blue collar approach which perhaps the Roy Keane era United might fit better, for lack of a better idea. Maybe an AC Milan? I still think the Dallas hate came a little later - in part as a backlash to all the fans throughout the country and really got revved up in the Post Emmit era when Jerry Jones became the biggest "star" of that team and has pretty much sucked as a GM. And I think there is plenty to hate about the Steelers! - (if you are saying you can't see much to hate, wasn't sure.)
Gotta go with Auria here. I was an Raiders fan in the 70s so you know what I think of the Steelers. But despite their 4 Super Bowls and my personal distaste, I remember "America's Team" as being less popular. The nickname alone was enough, plus their tiresome cheerleaders and Praying Tom Landry. Oh and Staubach was easy to dislike too. Shit I forgot Tony Dor-Sett. Yuck.
Again - my anecdotal evidence beats y'all's because there was clear evidence of fairweather Cowboys fandom on display throughout the country. I'm not saying there wasn't a lot to hate - but who could hate Ed Too Tall Jones, Randy White and Harvey Martin, Drew and Preston Pearson, Robert Newhouse? (Bob Lilly and Billy White shoes were a little before my time).
No, it wouldn't, but I was piggybacking off your United comment. There isn't a great team persona analogy for Pittsburgh in soccer because when they win, they do it pretty much without the fanfare that accompanies other big NFL teams. Even they're too star-studded. More like MK Dons or Swansea winning the CL a bunch of times and still carrying themselves like a small, fan-accessible club. No, I can't. I get that there are always going to be people who will hate on individual players, but I don't see anything to hate about the team. Never did, really. That's the second reason I because a fan (the first being Stallworth- he was the only AAMU grad in the league at the time, and was one of my dad's former Biology students). They never did anything to generate hate other than win games and titles. TBH I kinda liked the Raiders myself, and cheered for them in every Super Bowl I saw them play in except the one against Minnesota (I wanted the Vikes to win one). Pulled for them against Philly. That one didn't matter that much to me, but I was elated to see them beat Washington because I thought Theismann had the big head for no good reason. I wanted them to win against TB because I thought Jerry Rice needed a fourth title to go with the three he led the Niners to. Also, I was reared knowing that the AFL's hiring and placement policies were a bit more merit-based than the NFL's, so I became an AFC man as well, even tho the Steelers were one of the crossover teams (Baltimore, Cleveland) when the leagues merged. What clear evidence do you have that other teams don't? Terrible Towels were sold all over the country and still are. So were Cowboys Cheerleader posters. All you got is more TV time and that's due at least in part to the team being in such a big market compared to the other top teams of the same timeframe. All I'm saying is, the league and your owners deliberately made you popular. It wasn't any grassroots thing. Atlanta fans who hate Dallas hate Drew Pearson with the fury of a thousand burning suns. Preston played for us first, and won with us, so we give him a pass. White Shoes Johnson never played for the Cowboys. The only player Steeler fans hate is one of our own former QBs. I won't even type his name, and I spit whenever I have to say it out loud.
Oh right - duh I didn't mean White Shoes I meant Bob Hayes. We've beat the horse dead on the Cowboys thing, I disagree that it was entirely fabricated - it's like saying MJ was so popular because he was so pimped by the league. I don't buy that. Some of those Steelers teams had plenty of stars though - Bradshaw, Swann et. al. weren't stars?
Can you think of a better way to hate on the Cowboys than by mistaking them for the Oilers? I mean, seriously. Bum Philips and that goddam fedora-- who didn't hate that?