Best Start to a New Season: Dallas Sucks!
May 12, 2025
What took the NFL so long to realize that a fantastic way to start the season is a renewal of the best rivalry in sports – yes, better than Yankees-Red Sox – in TV-friendly Philadelphia?
Finally, commissioner Roger Goodell and his clueless sycophants scheduled the Eagles and Dallas Cowboys for the league’s gala season opener on national TV Sept. 4 at Lincoln Financial Field.
Bravo.
Given that the Birds slaughtered the Boys by a composite score of 75-13 during their championship 2024 season, it’s hard to imagine a better way for our city to welcome in a new trek to the Super Bowl.
For those who are new to Philadelphia, there’s something you need to know right from the start: Dallas sucks.
Some proud parents try to make certain those are the first words out of the mouths of their infant children, a process that begins while the little ones are still in the womb.
Cultured dads aim sweet music at the would-be mom’s belly bump to set the proper tone even before birth.
Eagle-fans chant, over and over, those magic words: Dallas sucks. Dallas sucks. Say it again. Dallas sucks.
In fact, I have seen with my own eyes the first piece of clothing for some newborns with those words emblazoned across the onesie. Dallas sucks.
It wouldn’t be much of a challenge to get Eagles fans ready for a new season, and especially after a Super-Bowl win over the big, bad Kansas City Chiefs.
But this?
This is almost too much to ask.
The last time the Eagles started a season against their hated rivals was the infamous pickle-juice game in 2000. They haven’t hosted the Cowboys in Week 1 since 1970 – 55 years.
Now I made a statement at the beginning of this post that would make me no friends in New England, where the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry is a blood feud like none in sports, or so they think.
Fortunately, I have no friends left from the lost 32 years that I lived in Providence, so that’s not a problem. Once I bailed on my hometown in 1983, I never looked back.
But the past 42 years living in and around Philadelphia has made me – in my own eyes, anyway – an expert on two of the most intense sports rivalries in America.
It’s no contest. Eagles-Cowboys is better, meaner, crazier and, above all, bigger.
We have more attitude here. That’s the defining principle. New York has too many other teams to concentrate just on the Yankees-Red Sox emotion. And Boston is too, ugh, cultured to teach their newborns a slur as their first words.
The best way I can describe the passion of Eagles-Cowboys is to recount a story from my memoir, Loud. Those who were there to witness it on that memorable night in 1992 still talk about it. 32 years later. It’s still hard to believe, really.
With a few edits for clarity, here’s the way I described it in Loud:
Whenever I am asked to name the single most outrageous act by a fan I ever saw, I choose the date October 5, 1992 in the final hour of a 15-hour pregame show before Monday Night Football that I hosted (along with many others), a bacchanal that featured sports passion bordering on lunacy.
It was my brilliant idea – in my first football season without Tom Brookshier – to start our show at its usual time of 6 a.m. from a massive tent outside Veterans Stadium that I would occupy later in the day for our pregame show from 6 to 9 p.m. Back then, I did seven hours of radio in one day without hesitation. In fact, if you count the four hours the next morning, I was on the air for 11 hours over a 28-hour period.
Those were the days, my friend. To gain a little extra attention for the annual visit of the despised Dallas Cowboys, I got the approval of WIP’s management to move the entire station lineup to the tent that day and to bill the event as the longest pregame show in sports history. (This claim went unchallenged; we did no research to confirm it.)
What none of us calculated was that fans would start drinking in our tent 15 hours before the game and lose control long before kickoff. Especially in that era, the fan base used every Eagles game as an excuse to overindulge, and night games were often a license to get crocked. Unwittingly, we were inviting a new level of misbehavior.
Security removed frenzied fans from the tent throughout the day, but the crowd got so big as game time approached, the private police were powerless to restore order.
The main event in a day of utter mayhem unfolded when an odd fellow who went by the name Chainsaw arrived with a posse of morons, and he was determined to make his mark before the crowd staggered across the street to the Vet. Fat and unkempt, Chainsaw brought with him two items – an inflatable doll with a Troy Aikman jersey on it, and a fully-functional chainsaw.
Chainsaw clearly had not thought through the plan, which was to sever the head of the Dallas quarterback with the chainsaw. Either because he was also plastered or maybe just really stupid, Chainsaw never calculated what would happen the instant the blade hit the air-filled doll.
“This is what the Eagles are going to do to Troy Aikman,” Chainsaw announced before sliding the blade under the doll’s throat.
It exploded, shards of plastic doll flying over the heads of hundreds of crazed fans. Then the chainsaw flew out of the Chainsaw’s hand and clipped the right wrist of his cousin, a limo driver named Dominic Yanni, before crashing to the ground. Yanni’s wrist was saved only because the chainsaw jammed before it could sever the bone.
The crowd filling every corner of the tent that night exploded in cheers, initially not noticing that Dominic was bleeding profusely. Even more remarkable was the victim’s reaction. He held up his bloody appendage seeking more approval – which inspired an even bigger roar. I strongly urged him to seek medical help, but my advice fell on deaf ears. He wrapped the wrist in a makeshift tourniquet and pranced triumphantly across the street with his equally impaired cousin.
The Eagles fulfilled our dreams that night, crushing the evil Cowboys, 31-7.
The rivalry has not always been as intense as the atmosphere that night, but both games between the Eagles and Cowboys, every single season, were major events, regardless of the quality of the teams.
Nothing has changed now that the Eagles are a threat to win a championship every year and the Cowboys annually disappoint. The truth is, it’s even more fun now because we win way more than we lose.
Thank you, Jerry Jones.
The emotion is ingrained in the hearts and minds (and wombs) of every Eagles fan.
That’s why the Eagles-Cowboys rivalry is the best in sports.
It’s also why the perfect start to a new NFL season will be Sept. 4 at Lincoln Financial Field.
Dallas sucks.