This article contains an in-depth explanation of the history of the Dallas Cowboys, a American professional football team that competes in the National Football League (NFL).
1960s
Origins The first NFL team in Texas were the Dallas Texans, which was a short-lived franchise that played a single season in 1952. The team relocated to New York City, after the previous New York Yanks organization suffered finanical problems and Giles and Colin Miller purchased the team to move to Dallas ahead of the 1952 season. The Dallas Cowboys were the NFL's first modern-era expansion team. The NFL was late in awarding Dallas; after Lamar Hunt was rebuffed in his efforts to acquire an NFL franchise for Dallas, he became part of a group of owners that formed the American Football League with Hunt's AFL franchise in Dallas known as the Texans (later to become the Kansas City Chiefs). In an effort not to cede the South to the AFL, the NFL awarded Dallas a franchise, but not until after the 1960 college draft had been held. As a result, the NFL's first ever expansion team played its inaugural season without the benefit of a college draft.
Originally, the formation of an NFL expansion team in Texas was met with strong opposition by Washington Redskins owner George Preston Marshall. Despite being located in the nation's capital, Marshall's Redskins had enjoyed a monopoly as the only NFL team to represent the American South for over 20 years since moving from Boston in 1937. Marshall was not about to give up the Redskins' status as the "professional football team of Dixie" without a fight. His intransigence came as little surprise to Dallas' would-be owners, Clint Murchison Jr. and Bedford Wynne. To ensure the birth of their expansion team, the men bought the rights to the Redskins fight song, "Hail to the Redskins", and threatened to refuse to allow Washington to play the song at games. Needing the song, Marshall changed his mind, and the city of Dallas was granted an NFL franchise on January 28, 1960. This early confrontation between the two franchises helped to trigger what became one of the more heated National Football League rivalries, which continues to this day.
The team was first known as the Dallas Steers, then the Dallas Rangers. On March 19, 1960, the organization announced that the team name was the Cowboys to avoid confusion with the American Association Dallas Rangers baseball team. The founding investors of the Dallas Cowboys were Clint Murchison, Jr. (45%), John D. Murchison (45%), along with minority shareholders,Ottawa Citizen – November 15, 1983 Toddie Lee and Bedford Wynne (Director and Secretary) (5%)Dallas Morning News reprint of original March 12, 1989 Sports Day article and William R. Hawn (5%).Breeders' Cup.com's William R. Hawn biography The new owners subsequently hired CBS Sports executive and former Los Angeles Rams general manager Tex Schramm as president and general manager, San Francisco 49ers scout Gil Brandt as player personnel director, and New York Giants defensive coordinator Tom Landry as head coach.Dallas Rangers Sign Tom Landry As Head CoachTeam – Pro Football Hall of Fame
1960–1964: Early struggles
1960: Winless first year The Cowboys began play in 1960, and played their home games a few miles east of Downtown Dallas at the Cotton Bowl. For their first three seasons, they shared this stadium with the Dallas Texans (now the Kansas City Chiefs franchise), who began play in the American Football League that same year. The 1960 Cowboys finished their inaugural campaign 0-11-1 with a roster largely made up of sub-par players (many well past their prime).
1961–1964: Gradual improvement
The following year, the Cowboys made their first college draft selection, taking TCU Horned Frogs defensive tackle Bob Lilly with the 13th pick in the draft (although the Cowboys finished with the league's worst record in 1960, the first overall selection in the 1961 draft was given to the expansion team Minnesota Vikings). The 1961 season also saw the Cowboys pick up their first victory in franchise history, a win over the Pittsburgh Steelers in the first game of the season. The Cowboys had played the Steelers in their first ever regular season game only the year before. The Cowboys finished their second campaign with an overall 4–9–1 record.
In 1962, Dallas improved slightly, going 5–8–1.
After the season, the Cowboys became the sole professional football franchise in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, as the AFL's Dallas Texans, despite winning the 1962 AFL championship by a score of 20–17 in double overtime, moved to Kansas City and became the Kansas City Chiefs. The Chiefs eventually joined the NFL as part of the 1970 AFL–NFL merger.
In 1963, Dallas fell back to 4–10. In 1964, they posted another 5-8-1 campaign. During this period, the Cowboys had the misfortune of being associated as the city where President Kennedy was assassinated. The Cowboys' success later in the decade largely contributed to restoring civic pride in Dallas after the assassination.
During the early and mid-1960s, the Cowboys gradually built a contender. Quarterback Don Meredith was acquired in 1960, running back Don Perkins, linebacker Chuck Howley and Lilly were acquired in 1961, linebacker Lee Roy Jordan in 1963, cornerback Mel Renfro in 1964, and wide receiver Bob Hayes and running back Dan Reeves in 1965.
1965–1969: First tastes of success and "Next Year's Champions"
Murchison was willing to be patient with the Cowboys despite their struggles. He believed in allowing experts to execute those portions of the business within their area of expertise. This led him to give Schramm, Brandt, and Landry wide autonomy in football matters. He also delegated much of his authority over the business side of the operation to Schramm, who represented the Cowboys at league meetings and exercised the team's voting rights.
This approach paid off in 1965, when the Cowboys went 7–7, achieving a .500 record for the first time. The seven wins were almost half as many as they had tallied in their first five seasons combined.
In 1966, the Cowboys posted their first winning season, finishing atop the Eastern Conference with a 10–3–1 record. Dallas sent eight players to the Pro Bowl, including Howley, Meredith, Perkins, and future Pro Football Hall of Fame members Hayes, Lilly, and Renfro. In their first-ever postseason appearance, the Cowboys faced the Green Bay Packers in the 1966 NFL Championship Game, with a trip to the first ever Super Bowl on the line. Green Bay defeated Dallas 34–27 by stopping the Cowboys on a goal line stand with 28 seconds remaining and went on to win Super Bowl I 35–10 against the Kansas City Chiefs.
Despite this loss, 1966 marked the start of an NFL-record-setting eight consecutive postseason appearances for the Cowboys. (Dallas later broke its own record with nine consecutive trips to the playoffs between 1975 and 1983, a record that was tied by the Indianapolis Colts when they reached the playoffs every year from 2002 to 2010, and broken by the 2009-2019 New England Patriots.) It was also the beginning of a still NFL record streak of 20 consecutive winning seasons that extended through 1985. That same year, the Cowboys adopted the practice of hosting Thanksgiving games. It is widely rumored that the Cowboys sought a guarantee that they would regularly host Thanksgiving games as a condition of their very first one (since games on days other than Sunday were uncommon at the time and thus high attendance was not a certainty). This is only partly true; Dallas had in fact decided to host games on Thanksgiving by their own decision because there was nothing else to do or watch on that day. With exception of 1975 and 1977, the Cowboys have hosted a game every Thanksgiving Day since.
In 1967, the Cowboys finished with a 9–5 record and had their first playoff victory, a 52–14 rout of the Cleveland Browns. They went on to face the Packers in the 1967 NFL Championship game, a rematch of the 1966 NFL championship game, with the winner advancing to Super Bowl II. The game, which happened on December 31, 1967, at Lambeau Field in Green Bay, turned out to be the coldest NFL game in history (about -13° F with a -40° wind chill). The Cowboys lost 21–17 on a one-yard quarterback sneak by Packers quarterback Bart Starr with 16 seconds remaining. The game later became known as the "Ice Bowl." Green Bay went on to win the Super Bowl again, this time against the Oakland Raiders.
Dallas remained one of the NFL's top teams for the remainder of the 1960s, easily winning their division in 1968 (with a 12–2 record) and in 1969 (with an 11–2–1 mark). Each season, however, ended with a decisive loss to the Cleveland Browns. The Browns in turn lost in the NFL championship game to the Baltimore Colts and Minnesota Vikings in the 1968 and 1969 seasons respectively. The 1968 Colts and 1969 Vikings subsequently lost Super Bowl III and Super Bowl IV to the New York Jets and Kansas City Chiefs, respectively. Repeated failures to achieve their ultimate goal earned the Cowboys the nickname "Next Year's Champions" and a reputation for not being able to "win the big one." Peter Gent, a wide receiver with Dallas from 1964 to 1968, later wrote a book called North Dallas Forty based on his observations and experiences with the team. This book was made into a movie of the same name in 1979. The book and movie depicted many of the team's players as carousing, drug-abusing partiers callously used by the team and then tossed aside when they became too injured to continue playing productively.
In 1969, ground was broken on a new stadium for the Cowboys to replace the Cotton Bowl. Texas Stadium in Irving, a Dallas suburb, was completed during the 1971 season.
At the end of the decade, the historians Robert A. Calvert, Donald E. Chipman, and Randolph Campbell wrote The Dallas Cowboys and the NFL, an inside study of the organization and financing of the team. A reviewer describes the Cowboys as a vital cog of "an industry that occupies an important segment of American time and attention . . . a sophisticated industry that has worked out complex statistics to select the best thrower of a forward pass. . . . [and] has reformed television habits . . . "Robert_A._Calvert, Donald E. Chipman, and Randolph Campbell, The Dallas Cowboys and the NFL, Norman,_Oklahoma: University_of_Oklahoma_Press, 1970
1970s
In the 1970s, the NFL underwent many changes as it absorbed the AFL and became a unified league, and the Cowboys underwent many changes as well. Meredith and Perkins retired in 1969 and new players were joining the organization, like Cliff Harris, and Pro Football Hall of Famers Rayfield Wright, Mike Ditka, Herb Adderley and Roger Staubach.
1970: First Super Bowl appearance Led by quarterback Craig Morton, the Cowboys had a 10–4 season in 1970. A 38–0 shutout by the Cardinals was the low point of the year, but the team recovered to make it to the playoffs. They defeated Detroit 5–0 in the lowest-scoring playoff game in NFL history and then defeated San Francisco 17–10 in the first-ever NFC Championship Game to qualify for their first Super Bowl appearance in franchise history, a mistake-filled Super Bowl V, where they lost 16–13 to the Baltimore Colts courtesy of a field goal by Colts' kicker Jim O'Brien with five seconds remaining in the contest. Despite the loss, linebacker Chuck Howley was named the Super Bowl MVP, the first and only time in Super Bowl history that the game's MVP did not come from the winning team.
1971: First Super Bowl victory and the move to Texas Stadium