I am a recovering Dallas Cowboys fan and Jerry Jones victim. I got into football at the age of 12 in the sixth grade. I never really had an interest in football before then, but I got a copy of “Madden 17” and fell in love with the game and the sport.

I lived in Atlanta, Georgia at the time, but I had grown up in Texas and, always the contrarian, I chose to be a Cowboys fan. Little did that kid know how much disappointment lay before him. The Cowboys have not made the NFC championship in 29 years. That is 10 years longer than I’ve been alive. In 2025, nine years after I initially aligned myself with this franchise and fandom, I am considering, for the first time in that near decade, leaving the ranks of the Cowboys faithful.

Jerry Jones has, on a fundamental level, failed this franchise. His inability to relinquish control to someone who understands the sport better has led to a spiraling nosedive which we may still be in the midst of. The hiring of Brian Schottenheimer as the new head coach was a straw for me. I cannot tell if it was the final straw, but it was a straw that made me consider whether things were better in other pastures.

For years, I have remained the strongest proponent of the Cowboys. I bought the hype year after year and was among the crowds of people proclaiming “this is our year.” Brian Schottenheimer, however, is not doing it for me this year. I do not know the man, and I may very well be wrong about my assessment of him, but with that being said, I was completely stupefied when I learned of his hiring. It was a maneuver so out of nowhere, so fundamentally bizarre that I wondered what Jones’ angle could possibly be. From what I know of his career, he is an offensive-minded head coach. This itself is not a bad trait, I have always liked defense more and found that teams with better defenses felt more consistent to me. But an offensive coach with a team like Dallas is a questionable decision.
There are two reasons I feel this way: the first of which is that Dallas’ offense is in freefall. Dak Prescott is not the franchise quarterback that Jones so badly wants him to be, and the “Great Wall of Dallas” may as well be the Walls of Jericho because defense players march right around it and they crumble with the slightest pressure.

The second reason I don’t like an offensive head coach in Dallas is because the defense is absolutely studded and completely underperforming. Mike Zimmer, while a very talented defensive coordinator, cannot do it all on his own, and Schottenheimer will likely not be much help to the struggling unit.

I grew up in Lubbock, Texas. I am a loyal Texas Tech football fan, and I have watched and cared for their struggle with football for longer than I have enjoyed the sport because my parents, my friends’ parents and the entire city of Lubbock cared alongside me. What I have seen in the Cowboys Faithful is a growing apathy, one I’ve never seen from the Tech fandom – the Red Raiders – in all my years. I got to watch Patrick Mahomes get drafted in 2017. My parents let me stay up late on a school night to watch the first 10 picks of the draft because I was so excited that my favorite football player may get drafted. And sure enough, with the 10th overall pick, the Kansas City Chiefs drafted my favorite player.

I have been a quiet Chiefs fan ever since then, but always faithful to my Cowboys. I lived in Atlanta and saw the entire rise up to support the Falcons in Super Bowl 51. I witnessed the complete heartbreak that befell the city when the falcons lost the best Super Bowl ever played, but what I didn’t ever see was an apathy for the team. Even when they sank to the depths of the league, while Georgia grew apathetic, the city of Atlanta never wavered in their support.

Jerry Jones has so fundamentally squandered the good thing he had going, that I have seen what once seemed impossible. The core base of the Cowboys, in Dallas itself, have begun to abandon hope. I, among them, have begun to wonder if I should join the ranks of another city and fandom.