FRISCO - The Dallas Cowboys' high-tech headquarters at The Star is made of glass and steel and striking architecture. The complex is nestled amongst high-rise buildings 20 minutes north of downtown Dallas, and sits at the intersection of two concrete superhighways that connect hundreds of thousands of cars per day to a sprawling Metroplex of seven million people. Their AT&T Stadium home field is situated in Arlington halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth, along an interstate that runs the length of the United States, and within an entertainment complex that includes a baseball stadium, concert venue, eSports stadium, amusement parks and countless restaurants.
Why then - given the obvious, numerous signs of a modern, progressive civilization - do TV sports networks love to portray Dallas as still living in the Old West of the 1800s with tumbleweeds blowing across dirt roads and citizens riding horses to work?
Answer: Because Dallas strangely leans into the stupid stereotype.
With Wednesday's announcement that the Cowboys will host the Kansas City Chiefs on Thanksgiving came a flood of thoughts. Given the popularity of the teams and the exclusive holiday window, the game will likely break TV ratings. It's a juicy matchup between two franchises that in the 1960s shared the Cotton Bowl as their home and fought each other for fans until the "Dallas Texans" moved north.
But we all also cringe at what's coming. CBS cameras are probably already out today getting promotional footage for what it will bill as the "Wild West Shootout." Are there ranches and longhorns and rural areas in North Texas? Of course. But the majority of the citizenry is like the rest of America, ditching their horseback rides and instead using GPS in their cars on the way to the stadium, where they will enter via a QR code ticket on their smartphone.
Just this month we got two more reminders of how the world perceives DFW, and how DFW allows the perception to fester.
After she was drafted No. 1 overall, new Dallas Wings' star Paige Bueckers donned a big, dumb cowboy hat and held up a pair of boots at her introductory press conference. And when he won the Byron Nelson golf tournament in nearby McKinney, Scottie Scheffler raised the trophy while - you guessed it - wearing a 10-gallon Stetson more suitable for the Back Forty than the back nine.
Bueckers is from Hopkins, Minnesota. Scheffler lives in the ritzy Dallas neighborhood of Devonshire, populated by a zillion Jaguar cars but zero Mustang horses. Over/under for cowboy hats worn by fans at Wings' games next season: 0.0.
Quarterbacks Dak Prescott and Patrick Mahomes might put on a high-scoring show come Thanksgiving. But, contrary to the imminent images, they'll do it with passes and not pistols.