Opening night of the National Football League season will feature the defending champions Philadelphia Eagles raising their Super Bowl banner tonight in front of nearly 70,000 of their beautiful, lunatic fans. It is the perfect way to kick off another year of the signature sport — and, really, entertainment — on the American television landscape.

Except for one thing: the Eagles are playing the freaking Dallas Cowboys.

The Cowboys, as always, are everywhere. The team’s owner, Jerry Jones, is all over my TV screens. He’s in commercials; he’s leading SportsCenter; he’s lecturing — in oddly compelling fashion — Jon Hamm on an episode of the Paramount+ series Landman. Advertisements for Netflix’s documentary series on the team’s history, America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys, are so ubiquitous that I’m fully expecting to see them on another NFL team’s uniform, or maybe tattooed on a boxer’s back. (Oh, and there’s also a whole other series on Netflix on the Cowboys; this one about their cheerleaders.) The team will be on national television at least eight times — almost half their games — throughout the season. You cannot watch anything involving the NFL — which is to say, you cannot watch anything, at all, anywhere — without the Cowboys popping up.

Which is a pretty impressive stunt to pull off considering, well … I have no idea why we are supposed to care any more about the Dallas Cowboys than any other team. Long after the NFL dubbed them “America’s Team” in the late 1970s, the Cowboys remain the most popular franchise in America’s most popular sport. This is particularly amazing because, well, there is nothing interesting about the Dallas Cowboys any more. It has been 30 years since the season they won a Super Bowl, and they’ve been nothing but a relentless supply of empty hype ever since. America’s Team? My fellow Americans and NFL fans, it’s time to move on.

Seriously, why are we talking about this team so much? Dallas missed the play-offs last year, they’re in the bottom half (at least) of just about any preseason NFL Power Rankings you can find, and, oh yeah, they haven’t even been to a Super Bowl since the season that began the year Patrick Mahomes was born.

The Houston Texans, just to name a team that happens to be in the same state, have won one more game than the Cowboys have the past two seasons, have a more charismatic and compelling head coach, and a younger and better quarterback. Yet I can’t even get my local sports bar to put their games on one of the smaller screens, the one next to the bathroom.

There are two reasons the Cowboys are everywhere, and they’re connected. First, they remain a major television draw, and the NFL became a $23 billion league primarily by making every decision to please the television gods. People know the Cowboys, and therefore casual fans will tune in to their games — even if they are watching only because they want to watch the team lose. Millions reflexively hate the Cowboys even if they couldn’t name any of their players.

The other reason is the one guy we all can name: Jerry Jones, whose relentless desperation for attention and controversy are enough to prop up the Cowboys brand all on his own. Jones, now 82, has been able to keep his face at the forefront of any NFL discussion, as a way of boosting the Cowboys brand and, it should be said, as a way of distracting from some of his questionable on and off-the-field issues. (He has never hired a Black head coach, for one thing.)

Jones has taken criticism for being too involved in Cowboys roster decisions — such as the much lambasted trade of Micah Parsons on this season’s eve. It’s one of the main reasons they have not been to a Super Bowl in decades — and for hiring second-rate coaches who will let him keep meddling with the team. But his skills as a marketer remain unmatched. Even if you’re sick of seeing his face, he will make sure you still see it. Over and over and over.

As a football team, the Cowboys are not inherently loathsome. Quarterback Dak Prescott is likeable and reliably sane; he’s an easy player to cheer for. So is star wide receiver CeeDee Lamb, who actually made me giggle during his new Old Spice commercial. You don’t see individual Cowboys players and want to jeer them.

But that’s of course one of the things that’s so frustrating about the Cowboys being everywhere: it actually would be kind of fun to hate the Cowboys if they were worth hating. Instead, they’re just a normal team with a bunch of normal guys whose visibility far outpaces their level of public interest. They’re just another team. And yet they are inescapable.

I do suspect that the nation’s Cowboys fever will break at some point, and for understandable, football-related reasons — eventually, you have to give sports fans more than just a brand.

As hagiographic as the Netflix series is, the fun of it is that it focuses on the Cowboys’ salad years of 1992, 1993 and 1995, an era when, led by Emmitt Smith, Troy Aikman and Michael Irvin, they truly were a fantastic team and incredibly interesting to watch and talk about. The nostalgia built into the series — how about we remember these Cowboys?! — can’t help but contrast with the flatness, and mediocrity, of the present version.

If the years since Aikman and Co have taught us anything, it is that Jones understands how to keep his team at the centre of every conversation. He just doesn’t know how to make them win.

• Will Leitch is the author of the forthcoming Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride, a contributing editor at New York magazine and founder of Deadspin