Timsup2nothin
Deity
- Joined
- Apr 2, 2013
- Messages
- 46,737
Nah. Their 'exposure' there is as 'the enemy.' They became "America's Team" during the first 'golden age' of televised football, through a combination of two things.
First, having no significant competition over a huge area. The Cardinals are still the second favorite in Arizona, New Mexico is solidly 'Cowboy country' and they own everything south of Missouri and Colorado in the middle of the country. During that era the Saints were called 'the aints,' the Oilers didn't have any fans even right in Houston, and no one in the rest of Florida feels any relationship to Miami, which was their only team so the Cowboys owned the gulf coast. Tampa, Jacksonville, Tennessee, Houston, New Orleans, Carolina, Arizona...talk to fans of those teams and they'll tell you that their parents or grandparents were Cowboy fans and likely still are.
Then they absolutely dominated their division year in year out during that critical time. They were always in the playoffs, usually having been the first team to secure their playoff berth because the rest of the division sucked so badly. That meant home games and half a season of speculation about how far they would go while other teams were still on "will they make it to the playoffs at all?" Tom Landry was a fixture on the sidelines and in the new age of TV football he and his signature hat became probably the most recognizable figure in professional sports outside of Muhammad Ali.
If they got any benefit at all from being in a division with those major market teams it came from crushing those teams so they weren't ever in the playoffs, or even sniffing the playoffs, during that era. Fans in the major TV markets wanted an 'America's team' because they sure couldn't maintain interest in their own. It also helped that there was a not completely subtle undercurrent in the presentation of this new media sensation that the NFC (usually led by the Cowboys) were the 'good guys' to the interloping upstart AFC's 'bad guys.'
First, having no significant competition over a huge area. The Cardinals are still the second favorite in Arizona, New Mexico is solidly 'Cowboy country' and they own everything south of Missouri and Colorado in the middle of the country. During that era the Saints were called 'the aints,' the Oilers didn't have any fans even right in Houston, and no one in the rest of Florida feels any relationship to Miami, which was their only team so the Cowboys owned the gulf coast. Tampa, Jacksonville, Tennessee, Houston, New Orleans, Carolina, Arizona...talk to fans of those teams and they'll tell you that their parents or grandparents were Cowboy fans and likely still are.
Then they absolutely dominated their division year in year out during that critical time. They were always in the playoffs, usually having been the first team to secure their playoff berth because the rest of the division sucked so badly. That meant home games and half a season of speculation about how far they would go while other teams were still on "will they make it to the playoffs at all?" Tom Landry was a fixture on the sidelines and in the new age of TV football he and his signature hat became probably the most recognizable figure in professional sports outside of Muhammad Ali.
If they got any benefit at all from being in a division with those major market teams it came from crushing those teams so they weren't ever in the playoffs, or even sniffing the playoffs, during that era. Fans in the major TV markets wanted an 'America's team' because they sure couldn't maintain interest in their own. It also helped that there was a not completely subtle undercurrent in the presentation of this new media sensation that the NFC (usually led by the Cowboys) were the 'good guys' to the interloping upstart AFC's 'bad guys.'