What Is 'The Dallas Cowboys Cycle' Meme? The NFL Dallas Cowboys Endless Cycle Meme Explained

The 2024 NFL season took off this last weekend, and with it, the Dallas Cowboys starts again. If you're unfamiliar with this "cycle," Dallas fans are considered among the league’s most pessimistic despite their team mostly getting a strong start and falling drastically in the end. At least, this was the case for the last three seasons.

The Cowboys fans' pessimistic reputation is a well-known and widely debated topic among NFL enthusiasts, as YouTube user Jarrod Johnson explained back in October 2019.

Although it is hard to predict the chances of the Dallas Cowboys winning this season's Super Bowl, the team's fans always end up in a spiral of hope and delusion, which has been turned into a classic meme on the internet.

But what does "the Dallas Cowboys cycle" mean, and why has it become a meme? Here's what to know.

What Is The Dallas Cowboys Cycle Meme?

The Dallas Cowboys cycle takes inspiration from the Endless Cycle image macro memes, depicting how the team and its fanbase usually behaves during an NFL season from the start to the playoffs. The flowchart became a prominent meme in July 2019, when the meme page NFL Memes posted the cycle of the Dallas Cowboys team when a new championship season starts (shown below, left).

On January 17th, 2022, the same page shared a new version of the meme, which was created by user @GhettoGronk (shown below, right).

How Did The Dallas Cowboys Cycle Meme Go Viral?

As mentioned previously, Dallas Cowboys fans are considered one of the most pessimistic fanbases in the NFL, as a research posted by The Athletic on September 4th, 2024, showing how followers of the site feel about their team’s chances in the 2024 season, which lists more than 80% of Cowboys fans being not so hopeful about their team's performance for the future games.

This mixed sentiment of loss and hope became a recurring joke on social media every new NFL season in subsequent years. For instance, on December 6th, 2022, Facebook user NFL Memes shared the Dallas Cowboys cycle image (shown below, left) and added a "We are here" red circle focusing on the "We Dem Boyz, this is our year!" caption.

On January 14th, 2024, X page @NFL_Memes posted the same image adding a "We are here" red circle focusing on the "choke in the playoffs" cycle, encapsulating every step the team is currently at throughout the seasons.

For the full history of The Dallas Cowboys Cycle, be sure to check out Know Your Meme's encyclopedia entry for more information.