Gross Football Lunch – Week 16, 2025 NFL Season

Gross Football Lunch Recommends: Beating the Cowboys

Football really sucks sometimes. Not only are 31 out of 32 fanbases doomed to watch their teams fall short of hoisting the Lombardi Trophy at season’s end, most of those fanbases are further doomed to watch their team miss the postseason entirely, which is not so much a crowning moment of sports misery so much as it is a depressive anticlimax. There is very little surprise involved in mathematical elimination. Any sports fan who has been watching the games saw it coming a long time ago, and has had weeks to prepare.

And yet, this past Sunday, after the Vikings were eliminated from the playoffs by virtue of the Bears’ blowout victory over the Browns, I was down in the dumps. The victory over Washington the Sunday previous was the most encouraging Vikings performance of the entire season, having been the first time in the entire season that JJ McCarthy looked competent under center. It was a nice win in the moment, but I found that I spent the ensuing week in the bargaining phase of grief. By then, the Vikings’ playoff chances were functionally non-existent; any and all emotional resources expended in service of manifesting a postseason appearance were wasted. I knew that holding out hope was wasteful, but I did it anyway, and I spent Sunday afternoon and evening reeling from the gut punch of elimination.

But by the time I went to bed Sunday night, I was the happiest I had been about the Vikings all season. Why is that, you ask? Because that night the Minnesota Vikings beat the shit out of the Dallas Cowboys on national television.

I need not enumerate the reasons why I hate the Dallas Cowboys, but I’m going to anyway, because fuck them. The Cowboys have been the most popular team in the entire NFL for over five decades, despite being completely useless for four of them. They get entirely too much attention as a result, driven in no small part by their pickled peacock owner, who is vain enough to never turn down an opportunity for attention, regardless of the consequences for his team. I’m also old enough to remember their dynastic 90s reign, which was noxious enough to make me sick of them, even though, like most kids, I was a front-running little shit back then. (Go Bulls!) If you’re a fan of any other NFC team (and a couple of select AFC ones), odds are your team has at least one devastating loss to the Cowboys lurking in its’ history. Maybe it happened a decade before you were born, but there’s no wrong reason to hate the Cowboys. Drew Pearson pushed off.

Like most decent people, I had written off the Cowboys before the start of the season and yet, to my horror, they entered last week’s game with a slim but real shot at the playoffs, despite the best efforts of their Conference USA-caliber defense. Someone needed to put any and all talk of a possible playoff berth to rest, and I am pleased and honored that my Vikings were given and converted the opportunity to drag these chuckle nuggets down into irrelevance with them. It was a fun game on merits, it was fun to watch McCarthy rebound from one of his silliest interceptions (which is a high bar to clear), and it was fun to watch Dak Prescott under siege all night. Granted, he got rid of the ball in spectacular fashion more than once, but that’s fun, too, and it is more gratifying to know that wasn’t enough.

Football doesn’t always give its fans the pleasure of success, but sometimes it gives us a safe and healthy venue to experience the simple pleasure of spite. This season has sucked and the Vikings face a deeply uncertain future, but this was a fun victory that couldn’t have come against a nicer opponent. Never tank. Fuck the Cowboys. So say we all!

NFL Confidence Pool – Week 16