Over the years, the misconceptions about what the Cowboys are, how they are run, and why they do what they do has reached mythical proportions. Myths, just like the narratives about the Cowboys, are often based on some kind of historical event, but are then over-elaborated to a point where they can become an ideological narrative that brooks no dissent: The narrative itself becomes the truth, regardless of any evidence to the contrary.
In sportswriting, ideological narratives have become one of the favorite vehicles of pay-per-click journalism because they require little thought and even less research on the part of the writer and hardly any thinking from an audience that likes to nod a lot more than it likes to think (not that we have any of that here!