To Schadenfreude!
Your team can't win every title, but your rivals also can't win every title either.
The Germans have a word for everything. They really do. The one unique word they gave the world that most other languages need a phrase to describe is schadenfreude. Schadenfreude describes the emotion of taking joy in the downfall of others, generally someone you don’t like or who has wronged you. It’s a common feeling in sports, because most fans have more teams they hate than they love. Given that only one team can win a title in a given year, schadenfreude is probably the dominant emotion by the end of a season.
The Philadelphia Eagles were never supposed to be in this position. Experts adjudged the team to have one of the worst five rosters in the league, and they had little reason to think that they were being harsh. While those pundits underestimated the talent the team had on the offensive line and at cornerback coupled with coaching, they were more right than wrong. The team was threadbare at a lot of pretty important positions, especially wide receiver and edge rusher. They won, against all odds, nine games and eked into the playoffs by virtue of a head-to-head tiebreaker against the New Orleans Saints and eight other wins against teams on a last place schedule.
No one expected them to win against the defending champions, and if you’re looking for a feelgood “but” in here, you’re in the wrong post. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers outclassed the Eagles in every phase of the game until the very end, when the team scored two touchdowns in garbage time. While everyone on Eagles Twitter convinced themselves the team was playing with house money, watching Tom Brady surgically take down an overmatched and overtired defense was not fun in real time. An Eagles playoff loss is awful to take the next few days no matter whether it was close or a blowout or in the Super Bowl or wild card weekend. Philly was ready to wallow.
And then the Dallas Cowboys came out and tried to run a quarterback draw with 14 seconds left and no timeouts left down six to the San Francisco 49ers, and just like that, the mood of the fandom and the general Philadelphia metropolitan area was immediately lifted.
The NFL is never as annoying as when the Cowboys, dubbed “America’s Team” in the 1970s because they were the right combination of successful and remote that made them a loose geographical fit for denizens of at least two dozen states at the time, are Super Bowl contenders. No one cares that the Atlanta Falcons have never won a Super Bowl, and few people outside the greater Chicagoland area give a shit the last time the Bears won it all was a longer time ago than when Dallas last won, but the Cowboys get inept enough not to make it past the divisional round of the NFC playoffs for 25 years, and suddenly, when they’re in first place in what is traditionally the second-weakest division in recent NFL history1, you know Fox Sports is ready with a puff piece interviewing “long-suffering fans” about how they’re finally going to win again.
Yeah, if you’re a Cowboys fan of a certain age, you get all the shit of being a fan of a team that people will automatically assume you follow because you’re a frontrunner without any of the actual results. However, I’m old enough to remember a time when the Cowboys were oppressively good and would suffocate teams with an offensive line less penetrable than the Great Wall of China and a defense that suspiciously didn’t give up a lot of points. They won three Super Bowls in the early-to-mid ‘90s, so much so that when the 49ers beat them in the NFC Championship Game in the 1994 season, the same 49ers that were fresh off winning four Super Bowls in the last decade, it came as a welcome refreshment. I had to live with obnoxious frontrunning fans yelling “HOW ‘BOUT THEM COWBOYS” in fucking Philadelphia, which by car is a 1,500-mile drive from Dallas. I had to live with both CBS and Fox Sports (depending on which side of the great NFL broadcasting realignment you were on) giving hagiography for that team and having it be warranted. My best memory as an Eagles fan before the Andy Reid/Donovan McNabb salad days was beating the Cowboys in the 1995 season, one where they’d kick the shit out of us in the playoffs to send us home en route to their third Super Bowl win of the decade.
You don’t kick those bad feelings if you’re a sports fan. You kinda have to have a certain psychosis to be one anyway. No matter how down bad the Cowboys are, seeing them lose in the playoffs is always cathartic, part because of the media machine and part because they always find the most hilarious ways to lose. There was the playoff loss vs. Seattle when Tony Romo greasy-fingered the hold on a chip shot field goal. There was Dez Bryant not catching the ball in Green Bay. Hell, you could write a whole chapter on Aaron Rodgers’ Packers teams taking the Cowboys hearts and crushing them, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom-style. Then there was Sunday’s game against the 49ers, where the Cowboys fell behind early, tried to surrender the game with coward’s punts, only to have Jimmy Garoppolo and Kyle Shanahan try to give the game back to them. Losing on a QB draw with no timeouts left and only 14 seconds left on the clock was just the icing on the cake.
Because of that hilarious loss, one that came after analysts pumped the team up even with shaky performances against contenders like Tampa Bay and Kansas City, one that came with puff pieces on worms like Ezekiel Elliott and Micah Parsons, one that insisted everyone else feel bad for the team because some fans wanted them to win, the Eagles game is a faint memory. It does help that the Eagles were the seventh seed playing the defending champs, and the Cowboys were at home against a team that had to have things break right for them to make the field in Week 18. It helps that the Eagles have three picks in the middle of the first round of the draft and can get a franchise-changing infusion of talent on rookie contracts while the Cowboys will be $13 million over the cap heading into the new NFL year needing to re-sign key players like Michael Gallup, Randy Gregory, and Dalton Schultz. It helps that the league and its media machine still treat the Cowboys like a marquee franchise in this league when both the Jets and Jaguars have made multiple conference title games since the last time the Cowboys made one.
There’s nothing material about that Cowboys loss that an Eagles fan (or a Giants fan or Washington Football Team fan or a Packers, Steelers, or any other Cowboys anti-fan) can hang their hats on. Schadenfreude, by definition, consists of empty calories. Joy in sorrow is hollow. At the end of the day, misery is the same whether you root for a team that loses in the playoffs in brutal fashion or one that didn’t even make the tournament altogether. You shouldn’t be able to revel in such lavish crapulence.
But sports fandom isn’t a logical endeavor. Again, you have to have a screw loose in your brain to engage with sports in a way that allows you to get melancholy over your team winning or euphoric over a rival losing to a team that isn’t yours. As long as sports is built on these abnormalities, schadenfreude will continue to double as sustenance. You can’t win a title every year, but you sure can see your rivals crash and burn every year. For an Eagles fan, the odds of the Cowboys winning the whole thing theoretically are the same as yours, which means the odds of failure are just as great anyway. One could say the Eagles have a better chance to win it all anyway because they have the front office infrastructure that has actually done the damn thing within two presidential administrations. Either way though, you’re not going to find satisfaction in every sports season based off success alone. You have to be a hater sometimes. Otherwise, why even bother watching sports in the first place?
The AFC South will always be the league’s trashheap until they prove otherwise.