New Jersey elementary school has kids punch up Cowboys player posters to take away Eagles loyalty
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The Philadelphia Eagles’ upcoming game against the Dallas Cowboys has an elementary school in New Jersey allowing its students to play Cowboys players in a hallway.
News 29 Philadelphia aired footage of students at Cooper’s Poynt Family School in Camden, New Jersey, using punching bags with pictures of Cowboys players attached. The footage went viral on social media.
The trick has generated mixed reactions.
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The Dallas Cowboys enter the game with a 4-5-1 record. The Eagles lead the NFC at 8-2 and are looking to win their second straight Super Bowl and third since 2017. Sunday’s game will be played in Dallas after the Eagles won the previous meeting between the two teams in Philadelphia on Thursday on opening night of the NFL season.
Eagles fans have earned a controversial reputation for their abrasive behavior over the years.
After the Eagles’ Super Bowl victory in February, footage captured by FreedomNewsTV allegedly showed a crowd looting a laundry truck and throwing towels into the air. Police responded to a fire when a pile of dirty clothes caught fire.
In another video, two people knocked down a light pole. Once the pole hit the ground, a crowd ran around it and began crushing it with their feet. Members of the crowd then picked up the pole and began carrying it through the city center.
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In January, Eagles fans came under the national microscope after one of their own, Ryan Caldwellverbally attacked a Green Bay Packers fan in viral images at the team’s wild card playoff game.
Former Dallas Cowboys player DeMarcus Ware, who played a game in Philadelphia every year during his Dallas career from 2005 to 2013, told News Digital that he once saw Eagles fans throw projectiles at his mother, Brenda Ann Ware, during a game in his rookie year in 2005.
“My rookie season, when my mom was in the stands, I told her not to wear my jersey, and she was in the front row. And we were down in Philadelphia, they were putting batteries in snowballs and throwing them and one of them hit my mom,” Ware said.
Watching his mother get caught by a snow-covered battery nearly caused Ware to abandon his football duties and run into the stands to start a fight.
“I turned around at that point and didn’t care about football anymore. I wanted to go find the guy in the stands. But I didn’t,” Ware said.
In 2018, an Eagles fan was arrested during an NFC divisional playoff game against the Falcons for hitting a Philadelphia police horse.
According to a police report at the time, a man was expelled because “he was intoxicated and did not have a ticket.” After his ejection from Lincoln Financial Field, the man walked up to a police officer on a horse and “began punching the horse in the face, neck and shoulder.”
After the Eagles won the Super Bowl against the New England Patriots that same year, multiple violent riots broke out throughout the city. Looting and destruction were reported at several convenience stores and a Macy’s department store. They overturned cars and knocked down traffic lights and streetlights.
One of the most famous examples of unruly behavior by Eagles fans took place in 1968, when a man dressed as Santa Claus took the field. Fans upset by a disappointing season booed him relentlessly and hit him with snowballs like Ware’s mother.
In 1997, during a Monday night game against the San Francisco 49ers, a mischievous Eagles fan fired a flare gun into stands full of other fans, endangering several lives.
After the flare was fired, multiple fistfights broke out around the stadium, with most of the violence being directed at 49ers fans by Eagles fans.
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“There were a large number of fights and acts of intimidation, many of them directed at fans wearing 49ers jerseys,” the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote at the time.
After the game, Eagles owner Jeffrie Lurie condemned his own fans.
“While we feel we have made significant progress in recent years regarding fan conduct at Veterans Stadium, what we witnessed last Monday was certainly a step backwards,” Lurie told reporters at the time.
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Jackson Thompson is a sports reporter for News Digital covering critical political and cultural issues in sports, with an investigative lens. Jackson’s reporting has been cited in federal government actions related to Title IX enforcement and in mainstream media outlets such as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The News and ESPN.com.