'Cowboys Fans All Laughing And Angry At Jerry Jones'?
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FRISCO - It's one of the dumbest and most trite tricks of the trade.
I've been covering the NFL as a beat writer and a columnist for 40 years, the last 35 years with the Dallas Cowboys.
I get the tricks.
But this is a rather dirty and lazy one.
The Cowboys selected Alabama offensive guard Tyler Booker with the No. 12 pick in the NFL Draft.
If you read CowboysCountry.com, you know ...
1 - Dallas hoped Tetairoa McMillan would be there, but he wasn't.
2 - Dallas weighed a trade-down offer from the Texans but turned it down.
3 - Dallas is delighted with its pick of Booker, the "classy bully'' who they hope will slide right into the right guard slot in the wake of Zack Martin's retirement. (Needless to say, most every team is "delighted'' at this point. Still ...)
Those are the facts. But ... what do we too often do in the media?
We create reactions using molehills and build them into mountains.
To wit, the volume of Cowboys-related headlines that read "Cowboys Fans All Laughing At Jerry Jones' Pick.'' Or, "Cowboys Fans All Angry At Jerry Jones' Pick.''
Is it true that there is a large part of Cowboys Nation who want Dallas to draft a starting-caliber receiver? Yes - again, as the Cowboys themselves wanted.
But it's also true that most fans, up until this weekend, had no idea who "Tyler Booker'' is. And it's also true that Cowboys Nation is a gigantic place, deep and wide.
So there is no such thing as a massive movement in one direction (laughing at Jerry) or another (angry at Jerry).
I'm not arguing against ripping/laughing at Jones for his many failiures and foibles; that's fair game. I'm arguing against reporting that there is some sort of a public "voting bloc'' of singular emotion ...
When that is literally impossible.
Astute Cowboys fans (and astute media), by the way, know that while Jones is the GM here and thus carried the final rubber stamp on move, he is not the unilateral "decider.'' The decision-makers are led by personnel boss Will McClay and new coach Brian Schottenheimer has a gigantic say as well.
But those are nuanced facts. I don't expect everyone to know 'em.
I do wish, though, that some of us would quit being lazy and trite and dirty and dumb.
"All Cowboys Fans'' don't think any one thing.
