If'n God's Name Was 'Jerry'

Living in Texas, one can be overwhelmed by the amount of football in the culture.  It's certainly not all bad, and I enjoy a great deal of it, especially the nicer side of 'Friday Night Lights' (the high-school football world) and college football.

 Will Boren (my son), Canyon HS 2011 WR/FS

The whole high school football culture here (yes, it is a culture:  when I was in high school, the coaches said, 'There's only two sports in Texas...football and spring football') is fun.  Small towns of a thousand people have stadiums that seat three thousand, they they are full every Friday night.  The backroads, sometimes thirty or forty miles between towns, are bumper-to-bumper at 5pm and again at 10pm on Fridays.  It's a sight to see.  (Yes, there are some bad aspects, but for the most part, sanity reigns and it is a lot of fun.)  The Class 4A state championship game was played in front of over 43,000 fans!

Southlake Carroll Dragons- Class 5A State Champs

College football in Texas can also be fun.  Texas is different than many other states, as there are more Division I programs here than most states can boast.  Some of the best are less than a hundred miles apart (shoutin' distance in Texas), much like the 'golden triangle' of basketball near Raleigh, NC.  The most recent brouhaha with Texas A&M leaving the Big 12 for the SEC has certainly upset some of this, and mostly for the negative for Texans, but that's another story.

Pro football, on the other hand, isn't quite so much fun.  The Houston Texans have finally made the playoffs, which is great, but they'll go in without some key players and likely won't last long.  In any case, the Texans will always play second fiddle to the team in Dallas.

As Matt Chandler once put it, the largest pagan temple in America sits in Dallas.  Every other Sunday, a hundred thousand people show up to worship there.  People that would be loathe to put $20 in the plate at their 'other' church will throw down six- or eight-hundred bucks at their worship service at Cowboys' Stadium.  Those who would complain about sitting through a 15- minute sermonette will sit for four-plus hours absorbing the sex and violence before them at the pagan temple.  If you've ever been to Jerry's house, you know that the scantily-clad Cowboys' cheerleaders on the largest TV screen in the world does indeed qualify as, 'sex'.  I'd tell you what my 12-year-old daughter said about it, but this is a family venue, and I'd be embarrassed to print it.

All that's to say, I've gotten a pretty big kick out of the angry rhetoric coming out of Cowboys' fans the past few days.  The 'Pokes lost to the Giants and will miss the playoffs.  People are angry at Jerry, the god they seem to worship (follow the money!), for not stepping back and letting a GM run the team.  Everything he touches seems to turn to gold, albeit with a bit of an amoral slant.  His team just gets worse.  (They still make him a fortune, though.) If Jerry Jones is really interested in fixing the Cowboys' woes, he needs to treat himself just like he treated Tom Landry back in 1989 (he fired him unceremoniously).

The irony is, these folks will still plunk down their kids' college-money to watch Jerry's team (and line Jerry's pockets) Sunday after Sunday.  The level of commitment is staggering.  Just imagine if Jerry actually did something good for them.  It makes me wonder why we don't see the same level of commitment from those who claim to worship Yahweh, who has indeed done good for us.  In fact, many who worship Jerry every Sunday are some of the same folks who claim to worship Yahweh, but if you look at where they attend fellowship on Sundays, and where they spend their money, it's hard to accept the claims.

I've stepped on enough Texas toes for now.  We'll see how the off-season goes. 

At least with the God I worship, He'll never need to fire himself to make things better.