Accountability is a hard thing in professional sports, no matter who you are or where you are.
It's especially hard in Dallas.
The atmosphere around this team is all about being a star and living that good life. It's the football equivalent of the scene in a boxing movie, where they show somebody doing their training in what looks like a posh hotel ballroom that they rented out and turned into their fancy gym -- it's shorthand for telling you this person isn't serious about putting in the work it takes to win this fight. That's the Cowboys all year every year, pretty much.
And on the rare occasions where the team is able to put their heads down and put in good work, it doesn't take long before the record gets good enough for everyone to start drowning them in praise. And soon they're patting themselves on the back. And if they aren't patting themselves on the back, guess who is -- the GM (who spends most of his time marketing the team, because he's not just the GM, he's the owner and wants them to be profitable).
With both major networks' top broadcasting crew manned by a retired Cowboy, I feel like we're only gonna have more and more young Cowboys coming through who prioritize obsessing over their personal "brand" as they try to make themselves more well-known and recognized, to position themselves for that post-playing career as a broadcaster. Jason Witten retired as every non-Cowboys fan's favorite Cowboy, and as a result he walked into a cushy Monday Night Football job despite being utterly unqualified and ill-suited for it. You're kidding yourself if you don't think that level of fame isn't the dream for most of these kids coming up today.
And look at the guys who didn't go the broadcasting route, with guys like Dez very visibly getting tied up in (and presumably profiting a lot from) advertising NFT-selling scams. Young players are gonna wanna build that brand to stay relevant enough so that when they retire, they too get to the be the ones being paid to help push somebody's pyramid scheme on their dumber fans.
If there's one thing about Micah Parsons' rookie year that made me get that weird, nagging "Oh no, time is a flat circle and I know what's gonna happen next 'cause this has all already happened before" feeling in the pit of my stomach, it's the time he spent in press conferences or on twitter trying to make various different nicknames happen. Like he was constantly workshopping lion-themed nicknames or nickname concepts, throwing stuff out there to see what sticks so he might be able to turn it into a thing and monetize it. Maybe it's nothing and he's just having fun, and he's great and he'll stay great. I hope so. Or maybe this is a sign that he's gonna end up going down the path so many of our young guys went down, where their #1 interest ended up being their own brand. If he comes up with some kind of signal or hand gesture he starts repeating all the time on the field (like Jaylon's swipe and Zeke's spoon-feeding and Ceedee's nose wipe and Dez's X), I'm definitely gonna wonder if he's caught the bug, too.