PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The Philadelphia Eagles are taking on the Dallas Cowboys this weekend in one of the biggest and most bloodthirsty historic NFL rivalries, and fans in Philadelphia do not have kind words to say about the Cowboys.
Even before the 1980 season, when one famous NFL Films clip showed an Eagles fanatic screaming “Dallas, we hate you!” days before their NFC Championship Game tussle at Veterans Stadium, Eagles fans have long-loathed all things about that supposed “America’s Team.”
“You can’t just automatically say a team is America’s team,” one fan said. “I don’t like them. I’m American. So how do they get that tag as America’s team?”
KYW’s original podcast, The Jawncast, teamed up with the Texas Wants to Know podcast to try to figure out how the tension between these two cities got so intense.
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According to 94WIP afternoon host Jon Marks, Philadelphia has hated Dallas for so many generations that he can’t pinpoint when it started.
“I just remember at a very young age that you didn't like the Cowboys. They were the enemy,” he says. “So my kids — right now, my daughter's 2 or 3 years old and knows ‘E-A-G-L-E-S Eagles!’ and you do not root for the Dallas Cowboys.”
In Dallas, though, Bryan Broaddus of 105.3 The Fan says they didn’t always see the Eagles as major competition.
“It used to be the Washington team way back in the day,” Broaddus remembers. “Now the last, say, 20-25 years, it's clearly the Philadelphia Eagles.”
That’s largely because the Eagles have improved in the last couple of decades, and the Cowboys have gotten worse. The narrative flipped when the Eagles won the Super Bowl in February 2018. The last time the Cowboys won a Super Bowl was in January 1996.
Eagles fan antics have contributed a lot, too. Broaddus worked as a scout in the past for both the Cowboys and the Eagles at different times, and he remembers some intense games at the Vet.
“In 1999, it was my first year with the Cowboys,” he recalls. “Michael Irvin, the star wide receiver for the Cowboys, gets hurt. He's laying on the ground [with a] neck injury. The Eagles fans are booing him laying on the ground and hurt, and you're going, ‘Man, this is serious here’.”
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Marks acknowledges that Eagles fans have taken it too far sometimes, but he gets a good laugh out of some stories.
“There was one Cowboys game … where they had like a blow-up Cowboys doll,” he says. “And there was this guy who used to bring a chainsaw … he's chainsawing this blow-up doll, and the chainsaw gets caught and it ends up clipping him. Like, literally, this is how worked up people get before these games.”
Listen to The Jawncast and Texas Wants to Know compare Philly vs. Dallas in the player below, on the free Audacy app, or wherever you get your podcasts.