First Rule of Cowboys Training Camp Fight Club: Talk About Cowboys Training Camp Fight Club

Jayne Kamin-Oncea. Getty Images.

Say what you will about the Dallas Cowboys. They're not everybody's favorite flavor of football franchise. They're certainly not mine. Jerry Jones is a confirmed lizard person. And the kind of rich guy a socialist propaganda ministry would hold up as an example of the evils of capitalism, because he continues to make obscene amounts of wealth despite his own obscene inability to build a winner. He surrounds himself with toadies and yes men. And hasn't hired a coach with the juice to take any other NFL job since Bill Parcells. Because nobody with other options would debase themselves to work for that incompetent cadaver.

That said, you've got to hand it to Jones. He knows how to make football fun. He has ever since those positively WILD teams of the early '90s. They played hard, won Super Bowls hard, and (while I hate using this word as a verb, I'll make an exception in their case) partied harder than maybe any team any has. Those accounts about the coke-and-sex-fueled nocturnal activities in "The White House" the players owned are the stuff of legend. Worthy of song and story. 

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And some part of that culture is still alive in Jerruh's World. Even in the drudgery of training camp, the 2023 Cowboys know how to have a good time. With a little bit of old fashioned ultra-violence:

And here's that Micah Parson's sucker punch from another angle:

And yes, that would be the best player on the Cowboys' roster throwing haymakers like he's skating a shift for the 1976 Flyers:

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That would be the same Parsons who a couple of weeks ago kindly requested that Dak Prescott needed to "Shut yo' bitchass up!" 

All just in a day's work for the men of America's Team. And when things are this out of control, this often, what's a Mike McCarthy to do? You can't exactly make guys run laps for fighting. There's just not enough hours in the workday to accommodate them all. And if you set every fighter to the locker room, you'd have no one left to coach. So you just let it go. And accept that it's part of the DNA of your franchise to be insanely self-destructive. 

Like I said, I'm not a Cowboys guy at all. And don't know anyone who is. But if this franchise didn't exist, somebody would've had to invent them. It's just a damned shame Hard Knocks isn't covering them this year.