Texans QB C.J. Stroud rips rival team ahead of 2024 minicamp: "Weak as* Cowboys"
There's a rivalry brewing in Texas and C.J. Stroud is the one in the middle of it. While the Houston Texans and the Dallas Cowboys play in different conferences, they are teams from the same state. And the Texans quarterback has no doubts about who really exhibits the Cowboy swagger and he thinks it isn't Dallas.
C.J. Stroud said, setting the cat firmly amongst the pigeons,
"I don't play for the weak a** Cowboys."
C.J. Stroud has plenty to crow about after rookie season
The Cowboys are known as America's Team and are one of the biggest draws in world sports. They are the most profitable franchise and have a long history of winning championships. The Texans, meanwhile, are a more recent club that is trying to fill the void that the Oilers left behind when they moved to Tennessee. They have yet to win a ring and are not as well-known as their counterparts.
But last year the Texans did much better than the Cowboys on the field, in no small part due to C.J. Stroud. The quarterback won the NFL Rookie of the Year award and carried his regular season form into the playoffs. In the Wild Card Round, he helped topple the highly-fancied Cleveland Browns.
Stroud's journey in his rookie year came to an end only in the Divisional Round as league MVP Lamar Jackson and the top-seeded Baltimore Ravens proved too strong.
Contrast this with the Dallas Cowboys and it is no surprise that Stroud considers them weak. Jerry Jones' team was at home playing the seventh-seeded Green Bay Packers.
Yet, they lost in a blowout and were eliminated in the Wild Card round to an unfancied team, which is the exact opposite of what the Texans achieved. It was an embarrassing defeat given that the Cowboys had not lost at home the entire season.
Their falling at the first hurdle provided a narrative to many people that Dallas players are chokers. And it is the same trope that Stroud is implying here when he says that he does not play for a weak-willed team like that.
It is a shot at Dak Prescott as well because one could infer that had the Texans quarterback been playing for the Cowboys, he thinks they would not have been such pushovers.
The Cowboys' matchup against the Texans on 19th November certainly became more interesting and one can assume that the comments made by C.J. Stroud here will continue to influence the subplot of that game.