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The Philadelphia Eagles‘ upcoming game against the Dallas Cowboys has an elementary school in New Jersey letting its students tee off on Cowboys players in a hallway.
FOX 29 Philadelphia aired footage of students at Cooper’s Poynt Family School in Camden, New Jersey, using punching bags with images of Cowboys players attached. The footage went viral on social media.
The stunt has garnered 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 the opening Thursday night of the NFL season.
Eagles fans have gained a controversial reputation for abrasive behavior over the years.
After the Eagles’ Super Bowl victory in February, footage captured by FreedomNewsTV purportedly showed a crowd looting a laundry truck and tossing towels into the air. Police responded to a fire as a pile of laundry was set ablaze.
In another clip, two individuals toppled a light pole. Once the pole hit the ground, a crowd rushed around it and started smashing it with their feet. Then members of the crowd picked the pole up and started carrying it through the city’s downtown.
In January, Eagles fans went under a national microscope after one of their own, Ryan Caldwell, verbally assaulted a female Green Bay Packers fan in viral footage 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 Fox News Digital he once witnessed Eagles fans hurl projectiles at his mother, Brenda Ann Ware, during a game 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’re up there in Philly, they were putting batteries in snowballs and throwing them and one of them hit my mom,” Ware said.
Seeing his mother get pegged by a snow-covered battery nearly prompted Ware to abandon his football duties and run up into the stands to start a fight.
“I turned around at the time, and I didn’t care about football anymore. I wanted to go get the guy who was 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 punching a Philadelphia police horse.
According to a police report at the time, a man was ejected because “he was intoxicated and did not possess a ticket.” After his ejection from Lincoln Financial Field, the man walked toward a police officer mounted on a horse and “began punching the horse in the face, neck and shoulder area.”
After the Eagles won the Super Bowl against the New England Patriots that same year, multiple violent riots broke out around the city. Looting and destruction were reported at multiple convenience shops and a Macy’s department store. Cars were flipped over, and traffic lights and lamp posts were torn down.
One of the most storied examples of unruly Eagles fan behavior took place in 1968, when a man dressed as Santa Claus walked out onto the field. He was booed relentlessly by fans upset about a disappointing season, and he was hit with snowballs like Ware’s mother.
In 1997, during a Monday night game against the San Francisco 49ers, one mischievous Eagles fan shot a flare gun into the stands full of other fans, endangering multiple lives.
After the flare was shot, multiple fistfights broke out around the stadium, and most of the violence was directed at 49ers fans by Eagles fans.
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“There were a large number of fights and acts of intimidation, many directed at fans in 49ers jerseys,” the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote at the time.
After the game, Eagles owner Jeffrie Lurie condemned his own fans.
“In spite of the fact that we feel we have made significant strides in recent years with regard to fan conduct at Veterans Stadium, what we witnessed this past Monday was undoubtedly a step backward,” Lurie told reporters at the time.
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