The diehard pigskin troll finds few things more enjoyable than watching a well-run football organization operate at peak efficiency. When everyone from the owner down to the kid who wipes the football with a towel is working together toward a common goal, all oars pulling in the same direction, firing on all cylinders, running with the ruthless precision of Mussolini’s trains, it brings a tingly little feeling to our nether regions.
In fact, there is only one thing better than a well-run gridiron machine. And that’s watching a dysfunctional football family implode under the weight of its own hatred, animosity and discord.
So it’s with great glee that we’re eyeing the ticking time bomb that is the Dallas Cowboys.
Dallas beat up Arizona 27-10 on Sunday. The highlight of the game was a 51-yard Tony Romo-to-Terrell Owens touchdown pass that effectively put the game away. You'd think the coach would be thrilled. But Romo and Owens are owner Jerry Jones' guys. Bill Parcells put his faith this season in Drew Bledsoe and Terry Glenn, who are out of the lineup due to ineffectiveness and injury, respectively. The combustible situation can lead to only one inevitable and highly entertaining outcome: a bitter, contentious divorce.
Everyone enjoys watching a bad marriage crumble. We’ve all sat through a wedding knowing full well that the bride would end up treating the groom like Katrina treated Louisiana (first some blowing, then it would suck, then he’d lose his house). And you have to admit, it’s a lot more fun watching the disaster unfold than watching Mr. & Mrs. Meantforeachother make goo-goo eyes while they read their cheesy, personally written vows.
Football fans are the same way. We’d all rather follow the pigskin equivalent of Al & Peg Bundy than Cliff & Clair Huxtable. And the NFL has never failed to provide us with a steady supply of horrible gridiron marriages.
In fact, Parcells and Jones are just the most recent in a long and inglorious line of dysfunctional twosomes the NFL has provided us with over the years. Here's how they stack up against some of the great Odd Couples over the years. Note that the 2006 Cowboys merit two entries on the list. And if the guy who came up with this great "Drew Bledsoe" blog,
tonyhomo.com, had any say, it might have been three.
Parcells and Jones
Parcells, the future Hall of Fame coach and serial retirer, has made it clear that he hates meddling owners more than he hates snug, form-fitting pants. To say that the megalomaniacal Jones is a “hands-on” owner is like saying
Tera Patrick is a “mouth-on” porn actress.
The only thing more astonishing than the fact that Parcells agreed to work for Jones in the first place is the fact that he’s now gone 2½ years without crushing Jones’s windpipe in front of a national audience. Last week, when it was revealed that Owens has a habit of falling asleep in meetings, Jones defended the player, calling it "an issue of personal health.” It became obvious to the world that having these two guys patroling the same sidelines was like tying two cats together by the tail and flinging them over a telephone wire.
Vince Lombardi and Paul HornungIt’s hard to imagine two more disparate pigskin personalities. Lombardi was the prototypical taskmaster coach and a symbol of the immigrant work ethic and conservative Middle American values. Hornung was the prototypical playboy/athlete who was suspended from the NFL for associating with seedy gambling buddies. To Lombardi, football was life itself. To Hornung, a football was a prolate spheroid you carried around on Sunday afternoon so you could spend the rest of your week drinking highballs and boinking Wisconsin women. Somehow they made the mixed marriage work: Lombardi and Hornung won four NFL titles together.
Pete Rozelle and Al Davis
Rozelle spent the 1960s and ‘70s ushering the NFL into world dominance. Davis was the skunk at the lawn party. Rozelle was a Brooks Brothers suit, Davis was, and still is, a nylon running suit. Davis was the Joker to Rozelle’s Bruce Wayne, a mad genius living merely to drive the commissioner insane. By the ‘80s, Rozelle should’ve been enjoying his golden years, but Davis named him in so many lawsuits, he spent more time in a courtroom than Anna Nicole Smith.
Lou Holtz and Joe NamathNot many people remember Holtz’s time with the Jets, and for good reason. The College Football Hall of Famer spent one season in New York. Less, actually: He coached 13 games for them in 1976, winning three. Holtz’s favorite hobbies in the mid-'70s were going to church, golfing with Bob Hope and badmouthing filthy hippies. Namath was an aging lothario even 30 years before he would accost a terrified Suzy Kolber. For Holtz, coaching a flamboyant babehound like Namath was like having Austin Powers for a quarterback. Plus, Holtz ran an option offense in college, and Namath’s knees (pictured here) had so many artificial parts, you could’ve used them as a bong.
John Elway and Dan Reeves
It’s almost never a good idea for a team to let its franchise player dictate who the head coach should be. In this case, it was. After the 1992 season, Elway stomped his feet and threatened to hold his breath until he turned blue unless the Broncos replaced Reeves with Mike Shanahan. The result? A .622 winning percentage and two Super Bowl championships. When Elway and Reeves, leading the Falcons, met in Super Bowl XXXIII, the game was a dull affair, leaving the denizens of Planet Pigskin to hope the two would settle their dispute with a WWE-like smackdown. Sadly, it never came to be.
Lawrence Phillips and Dick Vermeil
Drafted sixth overall by the Rams in 1996, Phillips showed he was reasonably good at evading tacklers. At evading the police … not so much. Vermeil was his uber-sensitive coach. By Phillips’s second season in St. Louis, he complained to Vermeil about playing time, blew off practices and team meetings, and was cut midway through the year. When announcing the move, Vermeil told the press Phillips could have been the best back he ever coached, and to the surprise of no one, proceeded to cry like Dr. Phil getting pepper-sprayed. Phillips was convicted in October of running his car into a group of teenagers, and Vermeil still cries a lot.
Doug Flutie and Rob Johnson
A quarterback controversy has never been so divisive as the one between these two in Buffalo. Flutie was an experienced leader and a proven, productive winner. Johnson was 6’4” and…well, tall. Skirmishes broke out in the Bills locker room along the Flutie-Johnson line. The Fort Sumter of this Civil War was the 1999 wild-card playoff game, when head coach Wade Phillips decided to start Johnson, the single most inexplicable decision in the history of football. The game ended with the Bills on the receiving end of the nut-kicker called the Music City Miracle. Flutie left Buffalo after the season and continued to prosper in San Diego and, now, as a college football analyst. Johnson accomplished nothing. But he’s still tall.
Mike Ditka and Ricky WilliamsThis was a marriage doomed from the start. The pressure was on as soon as the iconic Ditka gave up an entire draft as a dowery to win the hand of the enigmatic running back. The picture of these two posing as bride and groom on the cover of ESPN the Magazine still causes trolls everywhere to lose the occasional erection. Williams was a productive back, but the price the Saints paid to get him was too high for a guy whose top career goal was smoking African Babinja Weed with Lenny Kravitz.
Peyton Manning and Mike Vanderjagt
After the Colts lost a playoff game in January 2003, Vanderjagt established what for him would become a tradition: blaming his teammates. This loss he blamed on Manning for not playing with enough emotion. Manning responded by calling him an “idiot kicker who got liquored up and ran his mouth off.” So then Vanderjagt goes “Oh, yeah?” and Manning was like “Yeah…so what are you gonna do about it?” and Vanderjagt was all like “Well, I’ll get you at recess” and so Manning goes…
Terrell Owens and Everybody Else
Owens goes through bad marriages like Billy Bob Thornton. His first messy divorce was from his San Francisco quarterback, Jeff Garcia, when Owens questioned Garcia’s sexual orientation. (For the record, the Cold, Hard Football Facts refuse to dispute the hetero-ness of any man whose then-girlfriend, 2004 Playmate of the Year
Carmella DeCesare, got arrested for karate kicking his ex-girlfriend.) Owens then moved on to Philadelphia, where he and Donovan McNabb started their bitter, acrimonious divorce proceedings before they’d unpacked from the honeymoon. Now he’s in Dallas, where in half a season he’s already thrown dishes and lamps at the head coach, two starting quarterbacks, the receivers coach and the kid who wipes the football off with a towel.
