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Keith Strudler: How About Them Cowboys?

If you were near a TV and a sports fan on Sunday night, you undoubtedly heard the exasperating ending to the day’s final NFL football game. That’s especially true if that fan liked the New York Giants, who managed to grasp defeat from the imminent and unlikely jaws of victory. The G-men blew a 10 point fourth quarter lead, largely through a series of unfortunate mental errors. That process reached its apex in the final two minutes, when quarterback Eli Manning threw the ball out of the end zone on third down at the Cowboys one yard line instead of falling down and letting the clock run. That gave Dallas QB Tony Romo and the comeback kids enough time to drive the field and give the Cowboys a one point last second victory. It was a game the Cowboys were supposed to win, but suddenly seemed like they wouldn’t, largely thanks to a bunch of mistakes and bad bounces. It's a game story Dallas fans will retell for years, and one that drove Giants fans into an early season depression. New Yorkers assumed their team would be bad and probably lose this game – maybe by a lot. But it’s always worse to have false hope than no hope at all.

For their efforts in leading the game for the better part of sixty minutes, the Giants have largely been chastised and crucified. Most of the heat has come on Manning and his head coach Tom Coughlin. For example, the NY Post ran a photo of Manning with a dunce cap on Monday. Mind you, this is because he made one mistake on one play that still left his team with a six point lead with less than two minutes to go, and the other team eighty yards from a touchdown. A quarterback that’s typically described as one of the smartest in the league – which believe it or not, says something, given the evolutionary cerebral role of the modern quarterback. And remember, throwing the ball away on the one yard line is something quarterbacks are taught to do since they were about four years old. So it went against all better instinct to do the right thing in this case. Regardless, Manning and Coughlin made a split second mistake, one with an impressively large price tag. It’s like walking into a department store and accidentally trying on a $300 dress shirt – you didn’t think it would cost that much.

It’s hard to fully comprehend the public angst in the wake of this loss, although we’ll try. First, there is nothing worse to a fan than losing the first game of any particular season. On Sunday morning, the Giants were as good as any team in the league, at least according to their undefeated record. And now they're 0-1. They could have been 1-0 atop their division, staring down at the dreaded Cowboys. So this wasn’t simply one loss. It robbed sports fans of the one thing that matters most – hope. While this same exact game in week 10 would hurt, the sting would be much more tolerable.

Second, Giants fans are well aware that Eli Manning signed a contract extension that makes him wealthy enough to actually live in New York City. It’s $84 million over four years, which is about how long Giants fans will take to get over this. For that kind of money, fans expect more than excellence. They expect perfection, which, believe it or not, can’t be bought at any price. So when your multi-million dollar franchise quarterback is the one that blows the game, that’s not simply an accident – it’s a betrayal.

And third, this loss might have been slightly more tolerable if it came against, I don’t know, the Falcons, or the Chargers, or some other team you don’t care about. But it came against the Dallas Cowboys, Darth Vader of the National Football League, the team Giants fans would most like to see humiliated. When Giants fans watched their team lose, they also watched the Cowboys, and their awful legion of fans, celebrate victory. In the sports world, there are two things that hurt. Watching your favorite team lose. And, maybe worse, watching your dreaded rival win. On Sunday night, New York Giants fans got both. At the same time. Thanks to one stupid mistake that could have been so very easily avoided. That, more than any win/loss record, is what stings here.

Serendipitously or fatalistically, depending on your perspective, on Monday Forbes announced that the Cowboys are the league’s most valuable sports franchise, worth about $4 billion. The Giants are fourth at $2.8 billion. That also makes Dallas, on paper, the most exorbitant team in the world. They win again. So, how about them Cowboys?

Keith Strudler is the director of the Marist College Center for Sports Communication and an associate professor of communication. You can follow him on twitter at @KeithStrudler

 
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

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