Why the Eagle fans hate Dallas - the story from an old head who remembers (me)

[CouchCoach]

Can someone please explain the "pickle juice" game? I've heard it referenced several times. It was either before my time, or not recalling it. Thanks

It was Jim Johnson and they were opening the season in Dallas and it was 110 on the field. He'd done some research on cramps and dehydration and discovered pickle juice from a guy at one of the local colleges, Penn or Temple, and that became the pickle juice game and Madden had fun running that into the ground. The Eagles players handled that heat a lot better than the Cowboys and pickle juice became famous.

 

[Diehardblues]

One of the other reasons they hate us so much, was they wanted a bitter rivalry to start.
But we owned them, and they were just a small blip on the map to us. an afterthought. We dissed them as a real team basically. Because they could never get ahead of us in the overall scheme of things.

We were more concerned with the Commanders and Giants over the Eagles.
They always held that against us. So their SB every year was against us, twice. And most of the time they still failed.

They still hold that against us. The rivalry is there, and became more so with Buddy Ryan / Jimmy Johnson. But they still can't stand it that even after winning a SB, they still are behind us.

Right. I don’t recall much rivalry in the 60’s and not much more in the 70’s. Eagles were a dormant franchise for most of that time.

Our largest divisional rival was Washington and even Cardinals for part of the 70’s. Philly and NY weren’t competitive. We were so dominant in division that era.

Their hate begin more with our championships and America’s Team label which Tom said would put targets on our backs. No doubt the worst label ever put on us. I hate it!! Landry was right.

 

[ultron]

Awesome story, I wish Jaylon Smith could do the same thing to Carson Wince today.

 

[CouchCoach]

Jerry had an opportunity with realignment to move divisions but he chose the exposure and revenue the East delivers. Boooooooooooo

At that time, the only division with 3 of the 4 teams in the top 10 TV markets. Now, all 4 are in the top 7. 1, 4, 5 and 7. And DFW is close to taking PHL for 4th. The only divisions close are AFC and NFC W and the AFC will lose that with the move to Vegas.

And still, with all the TV market rankings, it has still been DAL, GB, NE and PIT that have driven the ratings bus. That would be the TV ratings dream Conference finals for the nets.

 

[CouchCoach]

Right. I don’t recall much rivalry in the 60’s and not much more in the 70’s. Eagles were a dormant franchise for most of that time.

Our largest divisional rival was Washington and even Cardinals for part of the 70’s. Philly and NY weren’t competitive. We were so dominant in division that era.

Their hate begin more with our championships and America’s Team label which Tom said would put targets on our backs. No doubt the worst label ever put on us. I hate it!! Landry was right.

And what cities would hate that America's Team label the most? The 3 in the East!

 

[Diehardblues]

And what cities would hate that America's Team label the most? The 3 in the East!

Yep.. the Cardinals hated it too. If I recall correctly they were first team to make us wear our blue” jinx” jerseys on the road.

Fans forget how big of rivalry Cards were too. Going to Busch was always a tough game. But yes, the 3 in the East came to hate it the most but everyone did.

Just an awful label ...and Tex embraced it for the money. In some ways Tex was worse than Jerry. Or just as bad anyway when it came to pimping the label.

 

[Zordon]

Look at a United States map, there is no reason other than the NFL why Philly and Dallas should be rivals lol

Well there are real culture differences at play too.

Compare Rocky to Dallas TV Show.

 

[CouchCoach]

Things have improved a little with the move to a new stadium, but back in the day when games were played in veterans stadium, mY buddy and I always drove from NJ (him) and Richmond, VA (me) to meet for the Cowboys at Eagles game.

• We never wore Cowboys colors, only idiots did that
• We never cheered unless in the end zone surrounded by Cowboys fans

I’ve seen Eagles fans throwing beer on young ladies wearing Cowboys gear.
I’ve seen Cowboys fans literally knocked out in the stands and handed down, mosh pit style to waiting security in yellow jackets.
I’ve seen a teenaged boy with his girlfriend, backed against a concrete wall on the walk out of the stadium after the game, held, slapped, and ridiculed in front of his girl for daring to wear a blue jersey.
I’ve seen young kids crying because their mom was crying as dad was bullied for no reason.

Sorry, but I hate everything about the Eagles and their fans.

I got to know quite a few Eagles season ticket holders and they were mortified by the behavior of some of their fans and the fact they had to have a jail on game days. It was bad behavior up front on display and our closest friends in PA were at the game when Irvin lay motionless on the turf and the number of fans cheering made them give up their season tickets and have not returned to a game.

But it wasn't just the Cowboys. Johnny Carson asked Alex Karras, a former Lion, the worst fans in the NFL and he didn't hesitate, "Philly, they gather every Easter to boo the kids that don't find any Easter eggs". The true mark of a flawed fandom is how quickly they will turn on their own team. They are the worst at that.

 

[Bleedblue1111]

It was Jim Johnson and they were opening the season in Dallas and it was 110 on the field. He'd done some research on cramps and dehydration and discovered pickle juice from a guy at one of the local colleges, Penn or Temple, and that became the pickle juice game and Madden had fun running that into the ground. The Eagles players handled that heat a lot better than the Cowboys and pickle juice became famous.

Oh ok. Interesting. I appreciate the info CC.

 

[Fritsch_the_cat]

Yeah, sure. The real reason is because the Cowboys have beat them like a rented mule for decades.

 

[Redball Express]

Go back to the 89 game when Aikman was a rook. It wasn't enough that they sacked him 11 times, the last time they sacked him, and I forget the player, he body slammed Aikman and injured his shoulder. The Cowboys were beaten, the QB was destroyed and their hate was so strong that they wanted more. Never convince me that player didn't get a bonus from Ryan after that game. I think the bounty board grew every time he played the Cowboys. Beat them? Hell, hurt them.

A lot of the Eagles hatred and the Skins with Allen was because of one man, Landry. He even had that goody two shoes QB, Staubach. Landry had been a physical defensive player but he was a cerebral HC and the origin of the "finesse" tag the players hated. He was calm and collected and the other coaches were fire. He showed more dignity in losing than they did in winning. He was GQ and they were DQ. Landry was Dallas. He was the ultimate white collar HC in NFL history and while they probably respected him as a man, they hated him and his team for what they represented. "Finesse" isn't supposed to win.

When Irvin was injured with his back and his career ended..

didn't the Iggle fans cheer his injury?

 

[Diehardblues]

I got to know quite a few Eagles season ticket holders and they were mortified by the behavior of some of their fans and the fact they had to have a jail on game days. It was bad behavior up front on display and our closest friends in PA were at the game when Irvin lay motionless on the turf and the number of fans cheering made them give up their season tickets and have not returned to a game.

But it wasn't just the Cowboys. Johnny Carson asked Alex Karras, a former Lion, the worst fans in the NFL and he didn't hesitate, "Philly, they gather every Easter to boo the kids that don't find any Easter eggs". The true mark of a flawed fandom is how quickly they will turn on their own team. They are the worst at that.

Ill never set foot in Philly again and prob not PA.

 

[Hogeboom4TheWin]

Good stuff.
But there’s also this number: 17-3. That’s the record the Cowboys had against the beagles from 1970-79. IMO, that’s when the hate got real thick. They just couldn’t beat us. I didn’t even think of them as a rival until the 80s.

Yeah, until Vermeil got there and turned them around they were pretty awful. They were clearly a legitimate rival after they dominated the Cowboys in the 1980 NFC Championship game. The fans and payers definitely thought of them as such. Anyone remember the old Doomsday Defense poster from that era? (I had one hanging in my cave back in the day). Not for nothing was the most prominent tombstone labelled "Philly". However, I think once the Gibbs-era Commanders started going to Super Bowls they became the main rivalry. Lots of great football played by the NFC East teams throughout the 1980s-- Commanders and Giants won Super Bowls, Eagles went to one, and the Cowboys went to 3 straight conference championships early in the decade. That is really how great sports rivalries develop, when there are good teams that compete with each other for titles year-after-year.

 

[CouchCoach]

Yep.. the Cardinals hated it too. If I recall correctly they were first team to make us wear our blue” jinx” jerseys on the road.

Fans forget how big of rivalry Cards were too. Going to Busch was always a tough game. But yes, the 3 in the East came to hate it the most but everyone did.

Just an awful label ...and Tex embraced it for the money. In some ways Tex was worse than Jerry. Or just as bad anyway when it came to pimping the label.

The difference is Schramm was right there as the NFL began to move from football to entertainment phenom and helped facilitate that. When Booger bought the team, that was already in place and he just took advantage of what Jimmy gave him.

The perception throughout the NFL was that Cowboys fans thought they were superior to other fans. That whole "football is religion" and I've argued with some that state football was created in Texas. Walter Camp, of CT, might argue that too.

In 77, one of my wife's sorority sisters and he husband came to Dallas from DC for a Skins game. He was the Skins fan and a lawyer, two reasons to smother him in his sleep, but he was a nice enough fellow. We met them for dinner after the game and she could not stop going on about how the women dressed for the games. She made the comment that TS should have runways. And her husband remarked that they seemed more interested in who was looking at them instead of watching the game.

I do not think that is really representative of the majority of the crowd but my wife was friends with one of the buyer's at Nieman's and she said the day before home games was huge in their really high end section for taking delivery on women's outfits.

For me, Dallas has always struggled with what it wanted to be....little New York or little LA? The difference is there is a reason for those two ports to exist, there really isn't an explanation for the Metroplex.

 

[DandyDon1722]

One of the other reasons they hate us so much, was they wanted a bitter rivalry to start.
But we owned them, and they were just a small blip on the map to us. an afterthought. We dissed them as a real team basically. Because they could never get ahead of us in the overall scheme of things.

We were more concerned with the Commanders and Giants over the Eagles.
They always held that against us. So their SB every year was against us, twice. And most of the time they still failed.

They still hold that against us. The rivalry is there, and became more so with Buddy Ryan / Jimmy Johnson. But they still can't stand it that even after winning a SB, they still are behind us.

That's true Jazz and I'll add this...

During the Jimmy, Ryan feud of the 90's, Tony Bruno, a Philly talk show host got a break and was picked up nationally by ESPN and he knew from his vocal show that when you went after the Cowboys, you got ratings and the vitriol that spewed from him to the country on a daily basis was brutal. Suddenly, it just wasn't people in Philly who really understood how much the Eagles hated Dallas.

There was also the movie Invincible, that again showed how much the city hated the team going back to the 70's.

It's fine by me. Sports doesn't seem to be what's about what's good as much as what's interesting. Nobody talks about the Patriots but everybody talks about Aaron Rodgers and Dak and Mayfield and the dysfunction of the Steelers.

Philly hating Dallas is good for the NFL, the fans and all of us.

 

[CouchCoach]

Ill never set foot in Philly again and prob not PA.

I didn't lose anything there but I will be making a trip to Hburg once spring gets here to see an old friend.

I met some fine folks when I lived there and some were Eagles fans and that was my first and only experience in living in the Northeast but I had traveled it for years. Being a Southern boy, I went expecting the worst and didn't find that. Yeah, some aholes but I know some AR, LA and TEX rednecks I'd put up against them.

My wife taught me to reach out first, smile and be friendly. She settled in quickly and liked to say "we need to take our Southern hospitality with us". Being in the radio biz and being exposed to so many people certainly helped.

 

[CouchCoach]

When Irvin was injured with his back and his career ended..

didn't the Iggle fans cheer his injury?

Yes, that game is when our closest friends from there left and never returned to a home game. They were in shock at the number of people that were cheering his injury but at that time they didn't know it was stenosis and the end of his career. I would like to think there wouldn't have been that many cheering.

One thing I wondered about that. According to some people that were there, there were a lot of people trying to get them to shut up but I never saw any footage of that.

With the Santa Claus story and that event, the media likes to perpetuate that image of Eagles fans and what's odd is that doesn't cross over to the Phillies, Flyers or Sixers fans like it does those Eagles fans, they're a breed unto themselves. The Eagles fans are the dark side of the NFL and we need that.

 

[HowardC]

I turned down a job interview because the job was right outside of philthy...

 

[CB61]

Anyone ever wonder about the roots of Philly's hatred for all things that are Dallas Cowboys? We can thank Lee Roy Jordan. And here is why...

In 1966, we played the first of our usual two games against the Eagles, winning that game 56-7. The second game was different, with Philly winning 24-23. The catalyst for their win was RB Timmy Brown, who returned two kickoffs back for touchdowns.

The first meeting of the ’67 season took place on October 29 at Franklin Field and ended with a 21-14 Eagles victory. Other than a surprise onside kick that turned into an Eagles touchdown drive, the upset win was pretty uneventful. The same can’t be said for the second Eagles/Dallas game that year. It was December 10, 1967 and the 4-7-1 Eagles traveled to Dallas to take on the division leading 8-4 Cowboys. The Cowboys had already clinched the division, rendering the outcome of the game meaningless. But our Doomsday Defense made it a statement game; a statement made at the expense of Timmy Brown’s jaw. In fact, Brown was interviewed by Stan Hochman of the Philadelphia Daily News years later and said he received phone calls the morning of the game from some of the Dallas guys he knew telling him there was a contract on his head. Ah, the days of nasty rivalries that were really nasty.

Anyway, in the late stages of the game, with Dallas having dominated the Eagles and built a 31-3 lead, the Cowboys fired the first shot in the “blood feud” that exists to this day. The Eagles possessed the ball and a passing play in the flat for Brown. After quarterback Norm Snead’s pass sailed over his head, Timmy Brown slowed down and relaxed. And that’s when it happened: Dallas middle-linebacker Lee Roy Jordan, who was in Brown’s vicinity, dropped Brown with an elbow to the face mask well after the whistle sounded.

With Brown dazed on the ground, Jordan stepped over the injured Eagle, taunting him. The blow was significant; it fractured Brown’s jaw and loosened six of his teeth. Brown said, “I wound up eating nothing but liquids for a month and a half. Jordan got a 15-yard penalty and that’s all.” And therein lies the root of Philly's hatred of our favorite team.

Thank God someone that finally remembers history and old sob like me you tell em buddy

 

[Hogeboom4TheWin]

Interesting.

Weirdest story I remember was the one about how we got our franchise.

More or less..

When the votes went out for Dallas to enter the league..

Tex Schramm had come from the Los Angeles Rams.

The Commanders were set to block the vote.

But the Commanders had their Hail to the Commanders fight song and some how Schramm had acquired the rights to the song.

So he bribed them to vote for the franchise and gave them the rights to their song.

There are a few other details to it..

but that's the just.

Murchison acquired the rights from the bandleader who composed it and held it as hostage from Commanders owner George Preston Marshall. Marshall's actress-wife supposedly wrote the lyrics to the song so that was probably a motivating factor in him paying the ransom instead of just coming up with a new one. Marshall really didn't want any "southern" teams in the NFL because he viewed the south as Commanders territory. Indeed, for many years, the southeast USA had no Titans, Panthers, Falcons, Dolphins, Bucs, Jags, etc. so the Commanders were kind of it.