As you sit by the fire (hopefully not out of necessity) to watch Sunday’s conference championship games, there are two different ways to ponder the Dallas Cowboys’ 30-year absence from this weekend. There is the silly stuff and there is the serious stuff.
The silly or funny part is simply the kind of head-shaking news created by the 30-year void. The Rams’ Matthew Stafford was 7 years old, presumably throwing a ball around his Highland Park backyard, when the Cowboys beat Green Bay here on Jan. 14, 1996, to get to Super Bowl XXX. The rest of the starting quarterbacks this weekend were not born. That includes Sam Darnold, an eight-year NFL veteran who has played for five different teams.
You don’t have to be a young college grad to not remember real success for the Cowboys.
As for the game itself, Brett Favre was a 26-year-old, five-year veteran. He had 236 starts to go (almost 15 full seasons) in setting his quarterback record for consecutive starts (297). And he has been retired for 15 years. On the Cowboys’ side, the late Larry Allen, a Pro Football Hall of Famer, made his first Pro Bowl.
Cowboys
With Barry Switzer coaching against Mike Holmgren in a stadium that was demolished 16 years ago, with a 38-year-old Bill Cowher coaching the Steelers to their first Super Bowl since the 1970s that same afternoon, there are all sorts of ways to illustrate how the Cowboys’ absence from this game is of considerable length. It’s when you talk about the teams still active that the conversation turns more serious and Dallas fans are more likely to get their blood boiling as to Jerry Jones’ grand plan for fixing things.
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The Cowboys’ owner-general manager talked in the season-ending news conference about wanting to finish his career with more Lombardi Trophies than any other owner. It was his not-so-subtle way of reminding fans that the team captured three Super Bowls in his first seven years on the scene before settling into this extended hibernation. It was probably a topic he should have steered away from, when you start to consider the teams still standing in this year’s Super Bowl chase.
In the NFC, the Seattle Seahawks had never advanced to a Super Bowl the last time the Cowboys played in one. They are favored at home Sunday to get to their fourth where they will try to win their second. The team in their way, the Rams, has won and lost Super Bowls while playing in two different cities (I’m not talking about Super Bowl sites, I mean their home games) since Dallas last entered the picture.
It only gets worse when we consider the AFC.
The Denver Broncos were still, in some regards, the hapless Denver Broncos 30 years ago. In 1977, former Cowboy Craig Morton had quarterbacked the team to its first Super Bowl where the Doomsday defense dismantled him and the Broncos, producing co-MVP’s on defense (Randy White, Harvey Martin). Morton went 4-for-15 for 39 yards with four interceptions. It was the kind of Super Bowl performance you could see C.J. Stroud having one day.
It’s true that John Elway had stepped up the program with three Super Bowl trips for Denver in the 1980s. But the scores — 39-20, 42-10, 55-10 — were more embarrassing than the earlier loss to Dallas.
Now the Broncos are a team with three Super Bowl titles — two with Elway after Terrell Davis and Mike Shanahan got involved, and another with Peyton Manning shouting “Omaha.” They would rate as a slight favorite to be playing for their fourth in two weeks if not for the injury to quarterback Bo Nix. With Jarrett Stidham playing for the first time this season, they will be challenged Sunday. Regardless, they have used this long, leisurely period in Dallas to turn a 5-0 Super Bowl deficit with the Cowboys into 5-3. Then there is New England.
The Patriots, like the Broncos, were sitting on zero Super Bowl wins 30 years ago. Their only trip, again like so many of Denver’s, had ended in frustration and embarrassment — a 46-10 loss at the hands of the magical ‘85 Bears. Thanks to Tom Brady and Bill Belichick, the Patriots have six Lombardi Trophies now, and it’s not going to shock anyone if young Drake Maye leads them to a seventh in Santa Clara next month.
This is as much a part of Jones’ legacy as those three Super Bowls he loves to recall and discuss at length in fawning Netflix documentaries. What other general manager hangs onto his job after not reaching a conference title round for 30 years?
It’s supposed to be a one-year-at-a-time league these days with free agency and coaching overhauls and young talent capable of turning a 4-13 New England team in 2024 into a conference championship club this season. Cowboys fans are excused for believing one year is no different from the next year and it all runs together in this drought that is very real and showing few signs of reaching the end.
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