LAS VEGAS - Around here, we call it "#53Brands.'' And it appears Emmitt Smith has gotten the memo.
The Dallas Cowboys legend and a foundational player in their last three Super Bowl titles - captured almost 30 years ago - made the rounds here in Las Vegas during Super Bowl Week and put the entire organization on blast, from Jerry Jones on down. ... and borrowing our "#53Brands'' concept in the process.
"Nobody wants to fight hard no more," Smith said in one of his interviews.
And what does this generation of Cowboys do instead?
"Oh, we are the Cowboys,'' Emmitt said mockingly. "Tell me how good I am. Check out my Instagram posts. See me on my podcast? I'm doing all this stuff. I'm everything!'' ... Without doing anything.''
This of course is what we've been saying for years, that Dallas' "marketing-first'' approach as an organization has now trickled down to the locker room, where celebrity is assumed ... leading to 53 different players being concerned about their 53 assorted "brands.''
"Everybody's patting them on the back without doing anything,'' Smith said. "What they're living off of is what happened in the past, not what's going down right now. They're not establishing their own legacy, let alone building off of the legacy that was established."
Smith said he was surprised that team owner Jerry Jones didn't fire head coach Mike McCarthy after the Cowboys' 48-32 loss to the visiting Green Bay Packers in the playoffs. That causes him to wonder if Jones' "mission'' is really about a Super Bowl. And it troubles him that this generation of "America's Team'' members seem to lack a respect for what came before them.
Said Emmitt: “When I got to the Cowboys, I knew one thing: I knew I could not disappoint Tony Dorsett as a running back. And I knew I could not disappoint Robert Newhouse as a running back. Or Calvin Hill. Or ... ‘Bullet’ Bob Hayes. ... I knew I could not disappoint 'Captain Comeback,' Roger Staubach. Ed ‘Too Tall’ Jones.
"I embraced the history of who we were because I loved them as a Cowboy when I was a kid myself.''
And now?
“I’m tired of being sold on what the Cowboys could be,” he said. “I’m tired. I’ve had enough of it because I’m more about what the Cowboys really are. And who we really are and who we were. That’s where I’m at. ... These 'motherbrothers' ...
"That product put on the football field (in the playoffs) ... It is not becoming of the Dallas Cowboys’ mystique, respect, the brand. It is not the appropriate representation of the brand itself. Now, Jerry understand these kind of words. The brand, right? 'The Star' ...''
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