From @ToddBrock24f7: If one NYG reporter’s tweet is accurate, the Cowboys could be at a major disadvantage when the Giants come calling for the holiday meeting.
The NFL’s schedule release day has turned into a cross between draft day and April Fool’s Day. Breadcrumbs litter the internet, with leaks and rumors abounding in every corner about the supposed details of who will play whom, when, and where. They’re not all true, but each of them could be. We all know the matchups; almost any pairing on any given Sunday is a valid guess as long as the original poster tacks on an obligatory “I’m hearing…”
But some of those predictions carry more weight than others.
Cowboys fans may have gotten a sneak peek at this year’s Thanksgiving Day guest list, thanks to a tweet from an ESPN NFL Nation reporter.
Jordan Raanan, who has covered the New York Giants for the Worldwide Leader since 2016, hit social media with a single turkey emoji Wednesday morning, leading most to assume there will be a late-November trip to Arlington to face the Cowboys in their traditional late-afternoon timeslot.
Of course, the Giants could be on the docket for the early game in Detroit, or they could even be one of the teams suiting up for the Thursday night game that week. (Or none of the above.) But a presumptive seat at the Cowboys’ Turkey Day table sure seems like the intent of Raanan’s post.
The Giants last paid a holiday visit to Dallas in 2022; the Cowboys won that one by a 28-20 score. The storied divisional rivals have squared off before the pumpkin pie only once prior to that, in 1992, when the Cowboys were victorious, 30-3.
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The NFL will release the full 2024 schedule Wednesday night.
Steelers wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster is going to be hungry for more than just turkey this Thanksgiving.
He’ll want to sink his teeth into some raven.
Last season, though, the Ravens left a bad taste in his mouth.
Baltimore swept Pittsburgh in what was a season the Steelers would, undoubtedly, like to forget.
What Smith-Schuster can’t seem to forget is his ill-fated fumble in overtime versus their archrivals last year. “To lose a game for your team is one of the hardest things. That feeling never leaves,” he said to Peter Schrager on “Good Morning Football”.
The Steelers hope to turn the tables in 2019 and send the Ravens back to Baltimore with a loss.
“I’m hungry, I’m ready to play against them… Thanksgiving is going to be fun for y’all. It’s going to be fun for us, too, because we’re going to come out for the W.”
Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin offers his thoughts on the readiness of Ben Roethlisberger for the season opener.
Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin was a guest on NFL Network’s Schedule Release 20 show on Thursday to discuss his team’s schedule.
In his own subdued way, Tomlin was stoked about seeing what the Steelers are up against this coming season.
“I’ve been at it a while. I hadn’t seen a schedule I didn’t like, particularly this time of year,” Tomlin said. “We’re all football lovers, and we miss competing, so it’s an exciting day when the schedule comes out.”
Straight-away, he was asked about whether quarterback Ben Roethlisberger would be in starting lineup Week 1 versus the New York Giants.
“As we sit here today, we’re extremely confident in his readiness,” Tomlin said. “We’re enjoying the process he’s going through right now. Obviously, it’s not without angst. The guy is coming off a season-ending injury and surgery. But we like where we are. He’s throwing on a rehab schedule, and it’s going well. We fully anticipate he’ll be ready to go for that opener.”
While we’re all waking from our tryptophan-induced naps and digging into Thanksgiving leftovers, the Steelers will be preparing to dig into division rival Baltimore Ravens at Heinz Field.
“We’re just humbled and honored to entertain our fans on a special day like that,” said Tomlin. “We’ll be excited about this one. Taking also into account that it’s an AFC North game against the Baltimore Ravens, it’s going to be a special day. We look forward to doing it.”
Being with the Cowboys for just a month didn’t stop DE Michael Bennett from laying into his teammates after their Thanksgiving day loss.
It’s often said that a football team, over time, inevitably takes on the personality of its head coach. Save for a few notable exceptions, most members of the Dallas Cowboys sound in media interviews a lot like coach Jason Garrett. They’re measured in their responses. They don’t reveal a lot of meaty information. They don’t engage in speculation or hyperbole or a lot of self-congratulations. Win or lose, up or down, they sound pretty much the same. They’re often uninteresting, even flat-out boring.
So it went over like a miniature firestorm when it hit social media in the moments following the Cowboys’ limp performance against Buffalo- in their home stadium, in front of a nationwide audience, on their traditional holiday- that somebody behind the closed doors of the team’s locker room was going off. Very loudly and rather emphatically.
Some Cowboys player is screaming in the locker room right now. It lasted for at least a minute pic.twitter.com/mNX60YEC7y
It was reported shortly thereafter that defensive end Michael Bennett, with the club for only a month, was the one who lit up his new teammates.
Afterward, many of them were asked about the moment, which had been audible throughout many of the tunnels underneath AT&T Stadium.
“That’s passion,” receiver Randall Cobb told media members. “That’s passion. We love this game; we want to win ball games. We’re not coming out here to lose ball games. Unfortunately, it goes that way sometimes. That’s just passion. I think it was a great message, and I think it was well-received.”
“Emotional locker room,” quarterback Dak Prescott said in his postgame press conference. “Just an exchange of words about us sticking together. Anything and everything outside of that locker room doesn’t matter. Simple as that.”
As for the specifics of what Bennett told the team, his fellow players felt it wasn’t for them to say.
“We’re not going to get into that,” Cobb stated. “What happens in this locker room stays in this locker room.”
But Bennett himself revealed some of the themes of his impassioned speech and why he felt it was necessary for him to speak up, even as a newcomer among a collection of high-profile superstars.
“Because it’s important that we understand that it’s a small window that we have,” Bennett said, as per Michael Gehlken of The Dallas Morning News. “We’ve got all the great players. The only thing we’ve got to do is execute in adversity. The enemy against greatness is the unwillingness to change. We’ve got to be able to change some of the things that we’ve been doing to demand more from ourselves and become the people we want to be.
“Every opportunity is in front of us, but it’s just on us to capitalize. To win, you’ve got to sacrifice a lot. It’s going to hurt. It’s painful. You play through injury, but you do it because you have to. To win that championship, to win that [Vince] Lombardi [Trophy], there’s no feeling like that. And that takes a lot.”
Bennett, an 11-year veteran who’s spent time on four different teams before being traded to Dallas from New England after just six games, won a Super Bowl ring with Seattle following the 2013 season. His perspective as a champion makes him the rarest of commodities on the current Cowboys roster.
“The champions are the people that get remembered,” Bennett said when asked about his speech, according to Gehlken. “They don’t remember who got the biggest contract. A whole bunch of great players got great contracts, but they don’t get remembered as champions. Champions are the ones who get the gold plates and the jackets and they understand what it takes to win. That’s just a certain mind-set. That’s just a certain ability to play tough in adverse moments.”
Bennett’s words seemed to hit home for his new teammates in Dallas after their Thursday night debacle.
“It’s all about the men in this room,” edge rusher DeMarcus Lawrence offered. “Looking each other in the eye, looking each other in the mirror and really making that turn about what they really want in this life and what they want out of this career and out of this game.”
Even immediately after a demoralizing loss that has fans calling for their coach’s head, Bennett’s address created a sense of optimism heading into the final quarter of the schedule.
“No one’s down on themselves,” defensive lineman Robert Quinn said in his postgame comments. “Guys know what’s at stake. But we’ve got to look ourselves in the mirror come tomorrow- or tonight, actually, I should say- and see what we can do better… We got four games left, we still got a shot. No need to hang your head. So let’s get it fixed.”
“No belief has been lost,” Prescott echoed. “No confidence has been lost. This is simply execution. This is on players. That’s kind of what that conversation was. Credit the leaders, credit Michael Bennett, those guys that started that. It was a great conversation, lot of great words passed. But it’s all about us executing and just getting the job done. Starts throughout the week about us just doing things better.”
Owner Jerry Jones had been the vocal one in the media all week, after calls for Garrett’s job increased to deafening levels following the squad’s Week 12 loss to the Patriots. But Jones, much like the head coach he’s defended for a decade, has opted for a calm and measured approach in dealing with both his coach and his players.
“If I had thought that calling somebody out or going in there and giving them a Knute Rockne talk would have made any difference as to how we execute or how we do,” Jones told reporters, “then I’d bottle that and sell it to a lot of different places. That’s not the way this thing works.”
Sometimes, though, it is the way this thing works. Sometimes a team needs a fiery Knute Rockne speech. Sometimes a dressing-down at maximum volume is exactly what the situation calls for. But Jones is right: coming from the billionaire owner, it falls flat. Coming from a head coach who is practically expected to lose his job, it feel’s disingenuous. Coming from a player who’s never held a Lombardi Trophy, it’s just talk. Maybe Michael Bennett was the only guy in that room who could provide that spark. Maybe that’s part of the reason the Cowboys went out and got him mid-season.
The last four games of 2019 will reveal whether Bennett’s spark actually lit a fire under this Cowboys team.
There’s an old trick that authors use when writing a work of fiction. At any given moment, in almost any situation, the idea is to make things as difficult as possible. Make the challenges bigger. Make the outlook bleaker. Make the circumstances …
There’s an old trick that authors use when writing a work of fiction. At any given moment, in almost any situation, the idea is to make things as difficult as possible. Make the challenges bigger. Make the outlook bleaker. Make the circumstances more dire. Give the hero more to overcome along the way than seems even possible, and it makes the victory that much sweeter and more satisfying in the end.
The Dallas Cowboys are still working on the story of their 2019 season. Their Thanksgiving Day meltdown at the hands of the Bills will certainly go down as one of its darkest chapters. But owner Jerry Jones is optimistic that there could be a plot twist coming on the very next page, and that this team has a surprise ending waiting in the wings.
“Adversity gives you an opportunity to really write a hell of a story about how to come back,” Jones said after the 26-15 loss.
But judging by Jones’s postgame comments, he is not willing to go so far as to kill off one of his major characters. Despite a tenure defined by mediocrity and punctuated by countless head-scratching decisions, coach Jason Garrett, who has led a seemingly-talent-laden team to six losses in their last nine games, will remain in place.
“This is not the time,” Jones said of a possible coaching change with four games left in the regular season. “For me, I’m looking ahead at another ballgame, and I’m looking ahead at winning four or five straight and helping write a story that they’ll talk about, how it looked like you were down and out and got it done. And I mean that. I mean that. That’s the way that I’m operating. Every decision that I make over the next month will be with an eye and mind to get us in the Super Bowl now.”
Cowboys players echoed that optimism, even if a story that ends in this roster and coaching staff ripping off a four-game win streak feels like pure science fiction.
“We know what we need to do,” linebacker Jaylon Smith told reporters after the loss. “Four games left, and winning is the name of the game.”
“We feel real good about our chances,” running back Ezekiel Elliott told the media afterward. “We feel really good about what we have in store for the rest of the season.”
As bad as the Cowboys looked hosting their traditional holiday contest, the team didn’t lose any ground in their chase of a divisional crown. Still clinging to a better record than the Eagles but with a more difficult slate of opponents ahead, Dallas players feel they need to win out in order to claim the NFC East and make the postseason.
“We can still win our division and go to the playoffs,” cornerback Jourdan Lewis said after the game. “That’s what it is. Of course, we wanted to win this one, but at the same time, we’ve got to look forward and do our best to get to the playoffs.”
“We know we can do that because we control our destiny,” quarterback Dak Prescott said from the podium in his postgame press conference. “We control the work that we put in, we control how we approach each and every day, we control the way that we prepare to get ready for these games. I have so much confidence in the men in that locker room, the character that they have, and I wouldn’t want to be, honestly, in this position with anybody else except those men. so confident in what we’re going to do.”
Prescott has spent months praising the character of the men in the locker room and expressing confidence in what they’re going to do. Problem is, they’ve only done it against bad teams. Thursday’s beatdown by Buffalo was just the latest dismal showing against the exact kind of quality opponent that Dallas would see should they qualify for postseason play.
The result was an embarrassing loss that left recently-added defensive end Michael Bennett screaming at his new teammates in the locker room.
Some Cowboys player is screaming in the locker room right now. It lasted for at least a minute pic.twitter.com/mNX60YEC7y
“It was very disappointing,” wideout Amari Cooper told the press, “just with everything that’s at stake, where we are in the season. A loss in general is just very disappointing, but to lose in this fashion with where we are is just devastating.”
“We’re definitely in the low of this season,” receiver Randall Cobb said in postgame interviews, “but the bright side is we’ve got four games to go. And anything can happen in those four weeks, and we kind of control our own destiny at this point.”
“We’re just pissed,” Elliott summed up. “We’re pissed at how we’ve let this season go. But the good thing about it is we control our own future. We’ve just got to find a way to go out there and win the rest of these games.”
“All it takes is winning one game and getting the thing rolling,” Cobb offered hopefully.
What it won’t take to get things rolling, according to the man who writes the checks? A Week 14 firing of his head coach.
“I wouldn’t make a change and give us a chance to do what I want to dream about doing,” Jones said. “I wouldn’t do that for love nor money. I’d give us zero chance if we did that.”
“He understands it,” Prescott said of the club’s impassioned owner. “He understands that we need everybody in that locker room- players, coaches, everybody that’s a part of it- to get to where we want to be.”
Fans may have soured long ago on Garrett’s maddeningly-even-keeled style and are understandably frustrated by the the lackluster results he’s getting from his players. But Jones isn’t ready to give up on Garrett, with whom he’s had a relationship since even before he joined the Cowboys as a practice squad player in 1992.
“I know Jason very well,” Jones said. “I’ve had a wonderful opportunity to spend a football life with him, so I know him very well.”
But sometimes an author can get too attached to his longstanding hero. And no conflict is too great that there isn’t hope that the hero can rise to the challenge and overcome the odds, no matter how improbable.
After a thoroughly gutting Thanksgiving Day plot twist, Jones is still thinking about how the 2019 disaster epic currently being penned in Dallas can get its storybook ending:
“The way that I’m going to handle this is encourage everybody to basically look to the possibility of winning out and end up doing something that people will write about 30 years from now and being a part of that. I like that story tonight as I eat my turkey.”
There’s no love lost between the Dallas Cowboys and Philadelphia Eagles. 1989’s Bounty Bowl didn’t start the feud, but it sure deepened it.
November 23, 1989. “Blame It on the Rain” by Milli Vanilli was the No. 1 song in the country. Harlem Nights starring Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor had just unseated Look Who’s Talking from a month-long run atop the box office. The Berlin Wall had come tumbling down two weeks prior. A gallon of milk cost $2.34. A gallon of gas was just over a buck. And, at least on the visitors’ sideline of Texas Stadium that Thanksgiving Day, the price for laying out Cowboys kicker Luis Zendejas was $200.
Saturday marks the 30th anniversary of the “Bounty Bowl,” one of the ugliest incidents in team history, an unfortunate stain on the league’s rich Thanksgiving Day tradition, and one of the most notorious chapters in one of the nastiest rivalries in the National Football League.
“Why would I place a bounty on a kicker who can’t kick worth a damn?”
The Cowboys were a dismal 1-10 entering the Week 12 game of the 1989 season; Jerry Jones had just purchased the team in February. Jimmy Johnson had replaced the legendary Tom Landry as coach. The team’s best player, Herschel Walker, had been traded away a few weeks earlier, and Troy Aikman was nearing the three-quarter mark of his rookie campaign as starting quarterback of the league’s worst squad. Hosting its annual Thanksgiving Day contest was one of the lone chances that season for the struggling Cowboys to shine before a nationwide audience. The opponent that day? The 7-4 Philadelphia Eagles, helmed by coach Buddy Ryan.
Down by a 10-0 score coming out of halftime, Dallas kicked off to open the third quarter. Moments after sending the ball deep on his first kick of the game, Zendejas was leveled by Eagles linebacker and special teams player Jessie Small. Replays seem to show that Small bypassed several members of the Cowboys coverage team to get to Zendejas. Once there, he delivered a massive blow that sent the 175-pound kicker flying and left him wobbling as he tried to stand.
In today’s game, the hit would have drawn an immediate flag, resulting in not only a penalty for the Eagles, but a stiff fine for Small from the league. But on that day in Irving in 1989, it was- incredibly enough- Zendejas who was flagged, for a low block. (In retrospect, Zendejas was clearly crouching in anticipation because he knew a big hit was coming; more on that later.) And for his bone-crunching blow, Small actually made money- directly from Coach Ryan, no less- according to blockbuster accusations leveled after the 27-0 loss by Johnson and the Cowboys.
The first-year coach claimed that Ryan had placed a bounty on Zendejas, promising a $200 cash payment to the Eagles player who flattened the kicker. Zendejas, coincidentally (or not, depending on your interpretation), had been cut by the Eagles less than a month earlier and then signed by Dallas.
Ryan laughed off the accusation as absurd.
“Why would I place a bounty on a kicker who can’t kick worth a damn?” he asked, according to Mark Eckel of NJ.com. “The guy was in a six-week slump. I wanted him in the game.”
Zendejas had, in fact, missed two field goals in Dallas’s previous game versus Miami. He did not seem to be, at least on the surface, a dangerous playmaking threat truly worthy of the personal ire of the Eagles coach.
The Dallas kicker, though, felt he had proof of the bounty. Eagles punter John Teltschik had warned him before the game that he was a target for a big hit. But there was more.
“Watch out for yourself…”
“In the days leading up to the game,” wrote Ray Didinger in a 2014 piece on the Eagles team website, “a story circulated in Dallas that Zendejas had received an ominous phone call from Eagles special teams coach Al Roberts. According to Zendejas, Roberts told him that Ryan had instructed his players to go after their former teammate.”
Zendejas claimed that upon his release in Philadelphia, he had been notified by Roberts, not Ryan directly. At the time, the kicker took to the media to voice his disappointment, calling his coach’s move “classless.”
”Buddy didn’t have the decency to tell me to my face; he had an assistant coach do it,” Zendejas said of his termination. ”When I phoned to ask him about it, he hung up on me.”
Roberts’s warning for Zendejas to “watch out for yourself” on Thanksgiving 1989 in the game that was quickly dubbed the “Bounty Bowl” was just the latest evidence of bad blood between Ryan and the Cowboys. Ryan, in fact, harbored a hatred for the rivals from Dallas ever since taking over in Philadelphia in 1986. That hatred that grew exponentially the following season.
During the 1987 NFL players’ strike, Dallas saw several high-profile members of their roster cross the picket line to continue playing. Ryan accused then-coach Landry of running up the score on his replacement players in a 41-22 win. After the strike had ended and full-time players returned, Ryan got his revenge on Dallas. He instructed his starting offense to run a fake kneeldown play – after two actual kneel-downs – in the final seconds of a game the Eagles were already leading 30-20. The ensuing rub-it-in touchdown beat the Cowboys by 17 points. In 1989, Ryan saw a chance to kick the rebuilding team when they were down, in their own stadium and on national television.
But the notion of Ryan placing a price tag on the heads of opposing players wasn’t even a new one.
“Ron Wolfley, a Pro Bowl special teams tackler for the [then-]Phoenix Cardinals, disclosed [in 1988] that he had heard that the Eagles had a bounty on him during the 1987 season,” as per a 1989 New York Times piece by Dave Anderson. He goes on to write that, in an Eagles-Bears game that same 1989 season, “similar bounties were whispered to be on Mike Tomczak, the quarterback, and Dennis McKinnon, a wide receiver,” and adding, “Ryan, who has feuded openly with Mike Ditka, also supposedly had offered a bounty if any of the Eagle players flattened the Bears’ coach on the sideline.”
To be sure, the Cowboys were well aware of the bounty rumors when they took the field that Thanksgiving Day. And Zendejas wasn’t the only Dallas player with a supposed price on his head.
“He never used the word ‘bounty.'”
In the first half of the game, Aikman was slammed to the ground by Eagles linebacker Britt Hager well after an aborted-play whistle. The hit, despite broadcasters Pat Summerall and John Madden clearly being entertained by the “fracas” that followed, necessitated X-rays for Aikman. Johnson claimed the Eagles had also put a $500 contract on his rookie quarterback.
“As far as I know, he never pointed out a guy,” Hager answered. “I never heard, ‘Go take the kicker out.’ Who would say, ‘Go take the kicker out?’ That’s why we all kind of laughed about it.”
He admitted, though, that Ryan wasn’t above at least insinuating that opposing quarterbacks were fair game for his players.
Eckel explains, “Ryan would say to me after the fact that he would tell his players at times before games, ‘I want to find out who their backup quarterback is today.” But he never used the word ‘bounty’.”
Anderson adds that Zendejas himself “spoke of having seen ”Buddy call guys out and give them $100” for what the kicker called a weekly Big Hit award but what Ryan called a Big Play award.
“Ryan acknowledged those $100 bonuses to his Eagle players, but insisted they were for an interception or a jarring tackle that caused a fumble in the context of the game, not for leveling a certain opponent.”
But, Sabin writes: “At the time, Hager and the Eagles special teams and defensive players would collect a pool of money and redistribute it for big hits, ‘decleaters,’ sacks, and turnovers. It wasn’t an uncommon practice in the NFL during a bygone era when the league’s image was less sanitized and the game wasn’t as scrutinized. In fact, the Cowboys had a similar system, according to [Dallas fullback Daryl] Johnston.
“‘There was no intent of malice,’ Johnston explained.”
But to anyone watching the 1989 Thanksgiving Day contest, there was clearly intent of malice in the Eagles hit that left a diminutive kicker staggering off the field.
Didinger, the famed Philadelphia sportswriter, had a private film session with Jimmy Johnson at Valley Ranch several days after the Bounty Bowl.
“On the film, you could see Small take a straight-line course to Zendejas. He actually ran right past Bill Bates, the Cowboys’ best special teams player, to get to the kicker who never made a tackle in his entire career.
“‘Why would he do that,’ Johnson said referring to Small, ‘unless somebody told him to do it?’
“I had to admit Johnson had a point.”
“You all know what you were doing!”
The New York Times quoted Zendejas as saying of Ryan after the Thanksgiving Day game, ”If I could’ve stood on my two legs, I would’ve gone over and decked him… We’ll play again in two weeks. If I see him then, I’ll deck him then. Honestly, I will.”
Zendejas did share words with several of his ex-Eagles teammates when the Thanksgiving game ended. Small, in fact, was overheard by Didinger telling Zendejas, ”I was just doing my job.” The Cowboys’ kicker reportedly replied, ”You know what you were doing! You all know what you were doing!” An Eagles’ trainer offered his hand; Zendejas slapped it away.
Johnson himself intended to confront Ryan right there on the field after the final gun. But the Eagles coach hurried off the Texas Stadium field, skipping the traditional coaches’ face-to-face meeting.
According to Didinger: “It was true Ryan left the field as soon as the game ended, but he did that every week. He didn’t believe in postgame handshakes. Professional courtesy wasn’t his thing.”
Johnson famously said of the moment, “Oh, I would have said something to Buddy, but he wouldn’t stand on the field long enough. He put his big fat rear end into the dressing room.”
In his response, Ryan, as he did with most things, deflected the criticism with a joke.
“I resent that,” Ryan said. “I’ve been on a diet, I lost a couple of pounds. I thought I was looking good, and he goes and calls me fat. I kind of resent that.”
The teams played again two weeks later. It was not nearly enough time, though, for tempers to have cooled. “Bounty Bowl II” had become a promoted event, and it carried the animosity into the Veterans Stadium stands, with Philadelphia fans pelting Cowboys players, NFL officials, CBS broadcasters, and even their own players with ice-packed snowballs in one of the most chaotic game environments ever seen at an NFL venue.
On the field, Zendejas was left alone, and he never went after Ryan. But Aikman took several hits during the game along with Eagles quarterback Randall Cunningham; nine total sacks were recorded in a notably physical 20-10 Eagles win. Cowboys punter Mike Saxon was also roughed up during play, drawing an unnecessary roughness flag.
“He never truly admitted it.”
As for the initial Bounty Bowl accusations, NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue- on the job just one month when it happened- followed up by interviewing a handful of players. There was even talk of a recording Zendejas had supposedly made of the phone conversation where the Eagles assistant had warned him of the bounty, but the kicker never turned over any such tape.
In the end, according to the Dallas Morning News, “the league dropped the inquiry, saying it found no ‘convincing evidence of an intent to injure any Cowboys player or to make contact with any player outside the rules of the game.'”
The 1989 season ended with the Cowboys finishing 1-15, the second NFL team to ever do so. Their league-worst record would have given them the top pick in the 1990 draft, but the team had given up that pick by taking quarterback Steve Walsh in the first round of the previous year’s supplemental draft. The Cowboys eventually traded picks with the Steelers to re-enter the first round; they selected running back Emmitt Smith 17th overall.
The Eagles came in second in the NFC East in 1989 and lost to the Rams in the wild card round of the playoffs.
Ryan never admitted to a bounty system in the years that followed, maintaining that position until his passing in 2016.
Johnson, now a FOX studio analyst, recalled Ryan’s denials in a 2014 interview.
“He sloughed it off. He never truly admitted it,” Johnson said. “I think Buddy was trying to play games. I kid him, ‘You had one of the great all-time defenses, but you never won a playoff game.’ I had the last laugh.”
Johnson’s championships may have afforded him the luxury to find humor in it long after the fact, but the Bounty Bowl saga remains a seminal part of the lore of the Cowboys-Eagles rivalry any time the franchises meet. Thirty years of hindsight has perhaps turned the original controversy into just a colorful chapter from a distant era; nothing, though, has diminished the intense dislike the two teams have for one another to this day.
