Thanksgiving Day 2001: A Dallas Cowboys odyssey

Rock and turkey bowl

If I was asked to compile a list of my passions, two of the top three would surely include 1990s alternative rock and Dallas Cowboys football. So when I saw that Scott Stapp of Creed retweeted a video of his band’s 2001 Thanksgiving Day halftime show, needless to say, I fell into a rabbit hole of listening to Creed’s 11 times platinum 1999 album, Human Clay.

I did so while just doom scrolling early 2000s Dallas Cowboys football stats (hey, remember when Eddie George finished his career with 13 games on the Cowboys in 2004?). Do I regret this? Probably not as much as I should.

Where do we even start with this? There is just so much to unpack about every choice made here. If you watch this for more than 30 seconds, is it any wonder the internet still brings this up? Creed is a band that already gets a lot of flack from music fans and critics alike for being a jock-jammy rip-off of other more successful bands.

This performance surely doesn’t help their case. While I am certainly not here to lead their critical re-evaluation, I will say that this halftime show is almost as fun as it is ludicrous.

Literally, everything about this performance is just straight-up bonkers. The fact that a shirtless man actually ascends into the air to fly at the precise moment that Stapp sings “Can you take me higher?” as his hair blows in the wind and he’s wearing his own jersey is just some all-time rock cheese.

Everything happening here just feels so much closer to something you’d see on The Simpsons as opposed to actual real life. But hey, the truth is stranger than fiction.

At this point, this halftime show is so crazy to watch that it’s become essential Thanksgiving viewing for me sliding right between Planes, Trains, & Automobiles and The Last Waltz (coincidentally between how hilarious it is and the “live” performance aspect, maybe this is perfectly in the middle of those the two).

Creed’s halftime show proved to be a lot more fun than the product on the field as the game itself has faded into relative obscurity. However, its lunacy provided the perfect backdrop to one of the more confusing endings to a game in Dallas Cowboys history.