The Dallas Cowboys kicked off their 2026 season with a disappointing loss against the rival New York Giants, falling 28-20. However, before going back home to Dallas, the team indulged in a meal that did not sit right for some people.
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“Cowboys getting Katz after the game for a ride home. Eating good. Jimmy Johnson would have knocked it all over,” Clarence Hill Jr. posted on X.
What happened after Dallas fell to the Giants in the season opener is a stark contrast to what Jimmy Johnson believes. Rather than sending a strong message, the team was greeted with a catered spread from Katz’s Deli set up in a stadium hallway, as photos from longtime Cowboys reporter Clarence Hill Jr. showed.
In contrast, Jimmy Johnson’s practices were built to feel as intense as gameday itself, forging the mental and physical toughness he believed teams needed to win it all.
He had a particularly rough way of driving that point home. After a loss in the 1990s, Johnson would tell flight attendants on the team plane to skip the postgame meal entirely.
“I say: ‘No, no meal. They don’t deserve to eat,'” he told them.
His reasoning was simple, if a little brutal.
“I wanted them to expect to win every single time they go out. I want them to be nauseated, sick to their stomach after they lose. Because that’s how I felt.”
That story had made the rounds after a clip from a Netflix series, America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys, brought it back into the spotlight last year, and it’s easy to see why people are calling it “cruel.”
That tough mindset helped, because the Cowboys of today are nothing like the absolute weapons they were during the veteran coach’s tenure. Despite a modest 44-36 record over five seasons, he took Dallas from a 1-15 team in 1989 to 7-9 in 1990, then 11-5 and the playoffs in 1991, before back-to-back Super Bowls in 1992 and ’93.
Jimmy Johnson may be remembered these days as a warm, likable personality (especially since retiring from Fox Sports earlier this year), but former players have described him as something closer to a ‘dictator’ when he was actually coaching. Tony Casillas, part of the iconic Cowboys Doomsday defense, knows that very well.
“At times Jimmy was crazy as far as the way he motivated people and players, and you look back, like, how did I survive that? That was a form of abuse,” Casillas said on the Sunset Lounge DFW podcast.
“But, you look at modern-day football, and you look at what we went through, and really that’s kind of what we needed as a group, and was able to do his thing of just motivating through example, through using different scenarios.”
The defense could’ve used some of that old Johnson fire. This rebuilt unit had real optimism behind it. Team owner Jerry Jones rallied behind it, quarterback Dak Prescott saw this as a worthy defense, and yet, it allowed the New York Giants to run amok.
Dallas couldn’t stop the run, couldn’t get any consistent pressure, and looked lost in the secondary more often than anyone would like. New York head coach John Harbaugh, who planned to play “bully football” in his first year of the Giants’ rebuild, did just that to the Cowboys.
Jaxson Dart took full advantage, completing 79.3 percent of his passes for 230 yards and three touchdowns, good for a 134.2 rating. He was dangerous with his legs too, adding 54 rushing yards, while Cam Skattebo ran for 81 more and a touchdown of his own.
As a team, the Giants averaged 4.5 yards every time they ran the ball.
However, the Dallas offense, which has an electric QB like Dak Prescott and two equally dynamic receivers in CeeDee Lamb and George Pickens, could not move the chains. The team looked nothing like the version that was sold during the offseason.
Jimmy Johnson built a dynasty on players fearing a loss; this Cowboys team got a deli spread after a shaky defensive showing.