With 52 Thanksgiving games on their resume, the Cowboys have plenty of holiday memories to choose from. Cowboys Wire picks out the 10 best.
America’s Team is as much a part of the All-American holiday as parade floats and candied yams. The Dallas Cowboys will host their 53rd Thanksgiving Day game in 2020. This season’s edition will mark the tenth time Dallas has welcomed their division rivals from Washington for the traditional late afternoon tilt. That’s the most of any Cowboys Thanksgiving opponent.
Over the years, the club’s Thanksgiving Day series has created some of pro football’s most memorable moments, including several chapters that are absolutely indelible within the Cowboys’ own storied history. To celebrate, Cowboys Wire takes a look back through the archives to dish out the ten quintessential Thanksgiving games that have meant the most to the team.
But the feast can’t be all deep-fried turkey and pumpkin pie; mixed in with some of the franchise’s most satisfying wins are also a few standout games that didn’t go Dallas’s way. Consider them the unpleasant cranberry sauce that your weird aunt brings every few years and makes you have at least a small helping of.
In honor of July 4, Cowboys Wire remembers when the team altered their iconic look to salute the American flag for an entire season.
Teams tweaking their standard uniforms is commonplace in today’s NFL. Apart from special alternate jerseys, throwback unis, and Color Rush combos, some teams tend to reinvent their uniforms as often as they’re allowed. A bigger helmet logo here, a flashy new number font there, a trendy matte finish to top things off. All-white. All-black. Maybe a sublimated pattern in the background or some extra swirls and stripes around the edges. It all makes for hype-worthy reveal videos on Twitter and certainly provides teams a boost when it comes to merchandising revenue.
But can you imagine a franchise just adding an entirely new out-of-left-field color that has nothing to do with their official on-the-field uniform, one of the most recognizable in all of sports, for an entire season simply because ownership wants to get in on a pop culture movement? This is the story of the year the Dallas Cowboys wore blue, white… and red.
The United States celebrated the 200th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in 1976. Plans for how the country might formally commemorate the Bicentennial had actually begun a full 10 years prior. Originally planned as a large exposition to be staged in either Boston or Philadelphia, the significance of the nation’s birthday seemed to grow exponentially in the hearts and minds of mainstream America as the date drew closer.
By the time New Year’s Day arrived that year, patriotism had reached a near-fever pitch from coast to coast. Watergate and Vietnam were in the past and a new American spirit was at hand. A red, white, and blue train was making a whistle-stop tour across the lower 48 states. Fireworks shows and parades were being planned in major cities. Historic tall ships from around the world docked in American harbors. Collectible coins were minted. Mailboxes and fire hydrants across the country got patriotic paint jobs from local citizens. The 1976 movie Rocky featured nods to the Bicentennial, dressing Apollo Creed’s character as George Washington and then Uncle Sam on fight night. Commercial products in stores were rewrapped in star-spangled packaging.
As one of the first major cultural events to take place in the Bicentennial year, Super Bowl X — played in Miami on January 18 — included its own special acknowledgement. That day, both the Cowboys and Steelers wore an honorary uniform patch featuring the official Bicentennial logo: a stylized red, white, and blue star designed by the man who also came up with NASA’s logo.
Super Bowl X proved to be the only time the patch was worn during an NFL game. The league decided against including it on teams’ uniforms for the 1976 season. With Bicentennial celebrations having culminated on July 4, enthusiasm had waned considerably by the time the regular season kicked off in September.
But not everyone was ready to snuff out the country’s birthday candles and declare the party over so quickly. The Dallas Cowboys had something subtle but special planned for 1976. It remains one of the quirkiest footnotes in the team’s illustrious history.
A tiny blurb in the July 30, 1976 edition of the Los Angeles Times is perhaps the first public mention of what was to come. Under a heading reading “Fashion note” printed in bold type, the Times reported, citing a league memo:
“In honor of America’s Bicentennial, the Cowboys will change one the blue stripes running down the center of their helmets to red for one season only.”
Yes, for the duration of the 1976 season, the Cowboys’ official uniform was red, white, and blue.
"Captain America" Roger Staubach looked the part in 1976 with the Cowboys' patriotic bicentennial helmet striping. pic.twitter.com/6lhmK6ufYX
According the book Glory Days: Life with the Dallas Cowboys, 1973-1998 by the team’s longtime equipment manager William T. “Buck” Buchanan, the idea was pure Tex Schramm. The visionary team president and general manager was never one to miss an opportunity to promote the Dallas Cowboys brand by tapping into whatever was new and popular. If the country was crazy for the stars and stripes, the Cowboys would be a part of it. After all, they already had the stars.
The team’s first two preseason games in 1976 were in Oakland and Los Angeles, explaining why an L.A. paper may have broken the news of the uniform modification. Californians were perhaps the first to see the unusual color combo on the Cowboys’ trademark helmets, but the striping scheme quickly made an impression on everyone else, too.
Buchanan tells the following story:
“During a preseason game with the Pittsburgh Steelers, Cowboy tackle Ralph Neely was asked by the opposing Pittsburgh lineman, ‘How long have you been wearing that red stripe on your helmets?’
“The ball was snapped, and Ralph knocked his man on his butt.
“Ralph turned to walk back to the huddle and fired over his shoulder, ‘First year, but we may keep wearing ’em.'”
Dallas did keep wearing them, and the distinct red stripe makes any photo from the 1976 season instantly identifiable as such.
The Eagles seem to be the only other team in the league to commemorate the Bicentennial with any sort of wardrobe alteration. Their uniforms from that season featured a small sleeve patch picturing the Liberty Bell with the number 76 cleverly woven into the design.
Of course, in today’s NFL, there are jersey patches and helmet decals worn for a wide variety of reasons. Often, they’re league-wide efforts worn by every team, such as the patches that commemorated the NFL’s 100th season or the pink ribbons (and accessories) worn during October to salute breast cancer research and survivorship, to name just two.
Similarly, individual teams frequently honor former players, coaches, or front office personnel with a special uniform feature to mark the occasion of their passing. Other notable events can get the one-time patch treatment, too. The Cowboys, for example, sported single-game uniform tweaks for their 2014 game played in London, the first game played in Cowboys Stadium in 2009, and the final game played at Texas Stadium in 2008.
But what the Cowboys did for the entirety of the 1976 season to mark the nation’s 200th birthday stands nearly alone in the annals of football history.
Bill Schaefer of the wonderfully exhaustive website The Gridiron Uniform Database was able to think of just two other occurrences where a lone team went rogue for a whole season and used a wardrobe change to call attention to a non-football movement.
The Rams were also the sole club to don a special drug abuse awareness patch for a portion of the 1988 season, according to Schaefer, “in conjunction with President Reagan’s ‘War on Drugs'” initiative.
But much has changed in the years since then, and the NFL has taken monumental steps toward streamlining their behemoth of a brand. It is nearly impossible to imagine a solo team in today’s league altering their uniform to the point of adding a new color to their trademarked palette just to take part in the zeitgeist moment of the day. In the present-day NFL, such a uniform modification would be either an official mandate across all 32 teams with stringently enforced rules on its appearance, placement, and usage, or it wouldn’t be allowed at all.
[Note: Just this week, the NFL has entered into discussions with players regarding the possibility of helmet decals or jersey patches recognizing those impacted by systemic racism and police brutality for the 2020 season, according to a report. The decision to wear a decal or patch could be left up to individual players, or teams could choose to act as a whole.]
The Cowboys, though, have always had a reputation around the league as a maverick organization. Even in those days, they did things their own way.
Of the Bicentennial patches worn by Dallas and Pittsburgh in Miami in January of ’76, Buchanan recalls in his book:
“Before Super Bowl X, the league issued written instructions dictating where to sew the Bicentennial patch on our jerseys.
“‘What do you think, Buck?’ Mr. Schramm asked.
“‘Could be distracting to the quarterback,’ I replied.
“‘Damned right,’ he said. ‘Put the patch on the jersey sleeve.’
“‘The NFL letter says to put the patch on the upper left breast,’ I said.
“‘No sir,’ he said. ‘Put it on the sleeve.’
“‘But the letter was signed by Pete Rozelle,’ I insisted.
“‘Buck, listen to me,’ Tex insisted, ‘put the patch where I told you to put it.'”
The Steelers wore the patch on their upper left breast, as ordered. The Cowboys wore it on their left sleeve. Not a word of reprimand came down from the league office.
“Tex and NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle were friends,” Buchanan astutely notes.
During the regular season that followed, the Cowboys’ decision to independently add a red stripe to one of the most recognized pieces of gear in sports somehow wasn’t as big a deal as it seems now. Maybe that’s simply because we live in an age where it almost certainly would never be authorized to begin with.
Paul Lukas runs the exceptional website Uni Watch, dedicated to the aesthetics and history of sports uniforms. He has singled out the ’76 red stripe as one of the top ten quirks of the one of the most iconic uniforms in all of sports, right up there with the Cowboys’ famously mismatched blues, silvers that aren’t quite silver, and retro Dymo Tape nameplates.
Of the Bicentennial stripe, Lukas told Cowboys Wire:
“It’s the type of thing that would get a huge amount of attention if a team did it now, but it kind of flew under the radar in 1976 and for some reason, never became a high-profile part of the team’s timeline or story. Definitely fits in with the whole ‘America’s Team’ thing, though.”
Ah, yes. The Patriots and their Boston-based fans appropriately wear red, white, and blue every season, of course. But if any team was going to play up the stars and stripes factor as a one-off for the country’s 200th birthday celebration, of course it would be “America’s Team.”
Except here’s the thing about that. In 1976, no one had yet called the Cowboys “America’s Team.” That nickname didn’t happen until 1979, well after the year-long celebration and Dallas’s red-striped headgear. NFL Films invented that particular moniker, making it the title of the Cowboys’ team highlight video recapping their 1978 season.
So the Old Glory-inspired uniform tweak might have- at least subconsciously- helped give birth to the “America’s Team” nickname in the minds of those NFL Films editors two years later. But despite the conspiracy theory many opposing teams’ fans cling to as absolute (and ever-nauseating) truth, the red stripe flat-out couldn’t have been the Cowboys’ attempt to rub their better-than-thou handle in the faces of the rest of the league.
Although the ’76 Cowboys finished that Bicentennial season with a record of 11-3 and the NFC East title, they lost in the playoffs to the Rams, keeping the unique red, white, and blue-striped helmets from ever making a Super Bowl appearance.
When the team next took the field, it was 1977. The Bicentennial was history, and the red stripe was gone. Today, the Cowboys’ contribution to the Spirit of ’76 exists only in those old photographs, a scant few collectibles still floating around, and the memories of long-time fans.
The Bicentennial helmets do claim a small bit of the spotlight at The Star in Frisco today, though. Largely forgotten by the modern era, the ’76 uniforms are enough of an item of historical interest that they feature in an exhibit showcasing the team’s uniforms throughout the years. There’s a mannequin front and center wearing Roger Staubach’s No. 12 jersey and his signature double-bar facemask, with a bright red stripe running down the center of the helmet. It’s a popular photo stop on the facility’s fan tours, and the red stripes make a good trivia question that the guides like to use to stump their groups.
In a 2018 poll, the Dallas Morning News offered up six uniforms from Cowboys history and asked readers to choose the best of all time. The 1976 red-stripe version came in dead last, with just 4% of the total vote.
For those that do remember the Bicentennial helmets fondly, though, it remains a beloved footnote in Cowboys history. Maybe because it was so subtle and quirky, maybe because they were the only ones to do it, maybe because they did it on their own, maybe because they never did it again, maybe because it would never happen now. It lives on as one of those little-known factoids that can win a bar bet or score points in a trivia contest, and it certainly helps true old-school fans size each other up with a knowing smile and a sly head nod.
But should the team decide to break out the red stripes one more time for the nation’s Semiquincentennial in 2026, it will be just about the coolest thing to ever happen to a whole bunch of nostalgic 50-something Cowboys fanatics.
April 11 marks the anniversary of the demolition of Texas Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys and the most famous hole in a roof in history.
The skies over the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex were streaked with gray on April 11, 2010. Tens of thousands of football fans tailgated and partied in parking lots surrounding Texas Stadium in Irving. It had become a familiar scene for many a Sunday at the home of the Dallas Cowboys.
But this Sunday at Texas Stadium would be markedly different. For almost four decades, the greatest players in the sport brought the house down with their passing, their running, their catching, their tackling. On this day, however, an 11-year-old boy who had won an essay contest would be the one to bring the house down, with the push of a button and nearly three thousand pounds of dynamite.
It’s been ten years since the iconic Texas Stadium was imploded. The team moved into their swanky new digs at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington in 2009, the previous fall. Their previous home in Irving had long since fallen into disrepair and sat empty in the spring of 2010, save for the 380,000 cubic feet of dirt that had been trucked in, 40 feet deep throughout the building, to safely dampen the planned explosion.
But in true Cowboys fashion, the team squeezed everything they could out of the old place, right up to the end. Seats, star-shaped signs, squares of turf, even the blue painted end zones had all been sold off as memorabilia. Cameras mounted inside the stadium would capture footage of the blast, to later be doled out to TV shows and movies that needed generic footage of a big building going boom. A team of seismologists had been allowed to place technical equipment inside to improve maps of the area’s underground geology.
Former Cowboys players came to say goodbye in person. There was a VIP viewing section. Local television stations broadcast the implosion live. There was a fireworks show before the grand finale. ESPN’s Chris Berman flew in to emcee the festivities.
Heck, the entire demolition was a sponsored event. Kraft Foods paid a hefty promotional fee to call it the “Cheddar Explosion” as part of a marketing gimmick to push macaroni and cheese.
And those thousands of fans who showed up in the pre-dawn hours on a Sunday morning to watch from a long distance as Texas Stadium got blown up? They paid $25 per car for the privilege.
The money went to charity, but still. There may not be a more Dallas Cowboys thing ever.
A place of their own
The Cowboys’ first home was the Cotton Bowl, located on the grounds of the State Fair of Texas. The grand stadium, site of the annual collegiate game of the same name, was already 30 years old when Clint Murchison’s expansion team came into existence. The NFL’s Dallas experiment took off quickly; in their seventh season, the Cowboys hosted Green Bay for the NFL Championship Game on New Year’s Day, 1967.
The Cotton Bowl crowd saw their home team come up short that day, just missing a trip to the first NFL-AFL championship. The team had generated almost 60% of the stadium’s total receipts that year, and within days of that loss to Vince Lombardi’s Packers (who would go on to win what would be retroactively called Super Bowl I), the Cowboys owner unveiled plans for a new futuristic arena that would be unlike anything else in the league.
With a seating capacity of over 75,000, the Cotton Bowl was actually too big for the Cowboys back in those days. The club never sold more than 31,000 season tickets there. Home games rarely sold out, and fans could always count on buying a walk-up ticket on gameday.
This year marks 9️⃣0️⃣ years of events held at Cotton Bowl Stadium. 🙌
Stay tuned throughout 2020 as we highlight 90 of the greatest who have stepped foot in the historic Cotton Bowl.
Murchison knew a smaller stadium would create more demand for seats. But Dallas’s civic leaders were not about to build Murchison a new downtown stadium, not when they deemed the historic Cotton Bowl perfectly usable. So the owner looked outside the city limits, to Irving. Ten miles west of the fairgrounds sat a 90-acre teardrop-shaped plot of land bordered on all sides by freeway. The nondescript highway interchange would become the new home of the Dallas Cowboys… and, in many ways, the sport’s first modern Mecca.
“It will be the finest football stadium to date in the world,” Murchison boasted.
While Murchison’s new stadium would seat fewer fans than the cavernous Cotton Bowl, he intended to go big in other areas, loading up his proposed facility with updates and innovations to ensure that the Cowboys would be the hottest ticket in town. Murchison imagined a venue with a computerized scoreboard that could display messages and animation in lights, aluminum-backed grandstand seats, bigger and plusher locker rooms, more restrooms and drinking fountains and concession stands, new grass, air conditioning, and even a retractable roof that could enclose the stadium entirely when weather was poor. It was, at the time, a radical fantasy akin to flying cars.
A few of Murchison’s notions, though, quickly ushered in a brand new era of unprecedented and exponential profit for team owners.
When plans were announced for the new stadium, Murchison also revealed an initiative to finance the facility through a bond-option system. Season-ticket buyers would be required to purchase up-front bonds of $250, $500, or $1,000, depending on where they wanted to sit, on top of the price of their actual game tickets. The bonds merely secured the rights to buy tickets. It was the birth of the personal seat license, now a common pricing tactic.
Murchison was also the first to make the luxury suite a mainstay of professional sports stadiums. Houston’s Astrodome, which had opened in 1965 and been nicknamed the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” had 53 self-contained skyboxes. The Cowboys’ new stadium would open with an entire upper-ring level of 176 private boxes called Circle Suites.
By June of 1969, the club had sold 16,000 $250 bonds and 60 of the inner-circle boxes at $50,000 apiece. The first home game was still over two years away.
Home sweet home… with a hole in the roof
Construction began in January of 1969, with Murchison, general manager Tex Schramm, coach Tom Landry, quarterback Don Meredith, and the mayor of Irving donning hard hats and turning the first ceremonial shovels. Murchison’s own construction company, the Tecon Corporation, received the nearly $18 million bid to build what would be called Texas Stadium.
By the time the building actually opened in 1971, the seating capacity had increased from 55,000 to 65,000, thanks to increased fan interest. And many of those fans ready to start taking in live games were of a decidedly different ilk than the Cotton Bowl’s clientele, thanks to the team’s marketing and selling of those Circle Suites.
Each suite had two rows of comfortable seating, three TVs with instant replay capability, and a wet bar. Occupants were allowed- no, encouraged- to decorate their suites according to their own personal tastes, and each suite seemed to be more opulent than the one next door. Marble floors. Animal print rugs. French antique furniture. Crystal chandeliers. For better or worse, pro football in Dallas soon became a high-society gala every single Sunday. And the venue’s new “business class” fans enjoyed a vantage point that was far removed from the blood and guts being spilled on the field below.
Players of the time likened Texas Stadium to the Roman Colosseum. Meredith, one of those early gladiators, noted the extreme juxtaposition inside the arena, which “some people describe as the finest facility in football and others call a vulgar display of wealth,” he said.
Some of the stadium’s other quirks rubbed players the wrong way in a more literal sense. The artificial playing surface, called Tartan Turf, was notoriously hard and slick. And razor-sharp.
“I don’t know what kind of turf it was,” running back Walt Garrison once joked, “but if you slid, it cut the hell out of you. It was harder than Chinese arithmetic.”
Like most fields, the one Murchison had constructed wasn’t perfectly flat, to aid in drainage. But the midfield crown was so steep that players on one sideline could barely see their opponents on the other side. One opposing team’s kicker said, “When you’re kicking, you’re uphill one way and downhill the other… There’s nothing good about it.”
But for all the (mostly) no-expense spared accommodations, Texas Stadium’s most notable feature was always the two and a half acre hole smack in the middle of the roof.
View from inside Texas Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys from 1971-2008.
Murchison abandoned plans to enclose and air-condition the entire stadium early on. Some say the full dome with retractable roof that he wanted proved to be too heavy for the structure to support. Other suggest the technology to build it was simply cost-prohibitive. The partial roof Murchison settled on covered all the stands, sheltering and shading spectators, but left the playing surface exposed to the elements.
The partial roof wreaked havoc with shadows across the playing surface. Thanks to the orientation of the field, one sideline was blasted by the full brunt of the Texas afternoon sun while the other- the one the Cowboys occupied- was comfortably shaded. The harsh contrast between bright light and pitch dark drove TV camera crews crazy. Fans could tell instantly upon tuning in if the Cowboys were playing at home, thanks to the Texas-sized open-air skylight overhead.
It was an architectural feature that would forever define Texas Stadium. Detractors dubbed the only-partly-enclosed stadium “The Half-Astrodome.” But the legendary explanation often attributed to Dallas linebacker D.D. Lewis was the one that stuck for Cowboys fans. The hole in the roof, Lewis supposedly claimed, was so that could watch His favorite team play.
Best of times, worst of times
For the next 38 seasons, The Almighty got a mighty spectacular show, as a host of football memories (some magnificent, some painful) played out under the famous hole in the roof.
The first game at Texas Stadium ended in a 44-21 Cowboys win over New England in Week 6 of the 1971 season. Running back Duane Thomas scored the first points in the new place, a 56-yard touchdown run just two minutes after the opening kick on October 24, 1971.
The Cowboys won the first postseason game ever played at Texas Stadium in the venue’s inaugural year. With a 14-3 win over the 49ers here, Dallas won their second straight NFC title; they would claim their first Super Bowl two weeks later.
Clint Longley, a backup quarterback nicknamed “The Mad Bomber” (for his habit of bouncing passes off Coach Landry’s coaching tower in training camp) became the hero of the 1974 Thanksgiving Day game here. Coming on in relief of a concussed Roger Staubach, Longley chucked a 50-yard scoring pass to Drew Pearson with 35 seconds left to beat Washington.
Defensive end Bob Lilly, the first draft pick in team history, was the first Cowboy inducted into the stadium’s Ring of Honor here in 1975, his name installed permanently in large lettering on the stadium walls. Devised by Tex Schramm, the Ring of Honor was a novel way to honor iconic players without retiring their uniform number. It remains the greatest honor for a Dallas Cowboy, with just 22 men enshrined. The concept has since been copied by several other teams around the league.
Staubach’s final win came here, a fourth-quarter comeback- naturally- in which he threw two touchdown passes in the final four minutes to beat Washington in the 1979 season finale. Staubach called it “absolutely the most thrilling sixty minutes I ever spent on a football field.”
Today in 1979, Roger Staubach played his last regular season game with the Cowboys.
After trailing Washington 34-21 with 3 minutes left in game, “Captain America” led the Dallas comeback & won the game 35-34 to win the NFC East & knock the Redskins out of the playoffs. pic.twitter.com/NVzYtgsQ1c
Cowboys kicker Luis Zendejas suffered a brutal hit here in 1989, allegedly at the direction of Eagles coach Buddy Ryan. Ryan had reportedly offered a cash reward for any Philadelphia player who knocked Zendejas or Troy Aikman out of the game that later became known as The Bounty Bowl.
Landry returned here in 1993 when he was inducted in the Ring of Honor. It was the coach’s first time back in the stadium since being fired after the 1988 season. He pushed for Murchison and Schramm to be inducted alongside him, but was denied. Landry would only set foot inside the building one more time before his passing in 2000.
Leon Lett muffed a blocked Dolphins field goal here in the waning moments of 1993’s Thanksgiving Day loss, a game where a freak winter storm had blanketed the Texas Stadium turf in snow.
Jason Garrett had his “fairy tale” moment here as a third-string quarterback on Thanksgiving Day 1994. With Troy Aikman and Rodney Peete sidelined by injury, Garrett got the start against Brett Favre and Green Bay. His first pass was intercepted. But in the second half, Garrett led the Cowboys to five straight touchdown drives.
Terrell Owens disrespected the midfield star here as a member of the San Francisco 49ers in 2000. Cowboys safety George Teague retaliated by leveling the wide receiver as Owens posed for TV cameras in a post-touchdown celebration.
Emmitt Smith broke Walter Payton’s all-time rushing record here in 2002. His 11-yard rumble in the fourth quarter of a loss to Seattle was the culmination of a personal goal he had written down for himself even before being drafted by Dallas in 1990.
IRVING, TX – OCTOBER 27: Running back Emmitt Smith celebrates after breaking the all time NFL rushing record against the Seattle Seahawks at Texas Stadium on October 27, 2002 in Irving, Texas. The Seahawks defeated the Cowboys 17-14. (Photo by Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)
Aikman, Smith, and Michael Irvin entered the Ring of Honor together here in 2005. But the Triplets couldn’t help Bill Parcells’s squad preserve a shutout over Washington; two shocking touchdown catches by Santana Moss in the last four minutes gave the Redskins their first win at Texas Stadium in a decade.
An undrafted free agent named Tony Romo made his NFL debut here on a Monday night in 2006. After Drew Bledsoe tossed an interception just before halftime, Parcells made a switch at quarterback. Romo’s first pass was picked off and Dallas lost the game, but Romo kept the starting job, winning six of his ten starts that season.
The Baltimore Ravens ruined the stadium’s going-away party here on December 20, 2008. In the final game played at Texas Stadium, a Romo-led rally fell short when the Cowboys defense gave up an 82-yard touchdown run late in the fourth quarter. The last touchdown in the stadium was also the longest scoring run Dallas had ever allowed in the building.
From 1971 through the farewell season of 2008, the Cowboys played 313 regular-season and playoff games at Texas Stadium. They went 213-100 overall, an impressive .681 winning percentage.
More than a game
Although Texas Stadium was built to be the home of the Cowboys, it served other purposes, too. High school and college teams from around the state got plenty of use out of the venue over the years; SMU called the arena home from 1979 through 1986. The NFL even staged the 1973 Pro Bowl there.
But the building housed more than football games. Large crowds were drawn to Texas Stadium for other sporting events as well, including soccer, bull riding, lacrosse, and professional wrestling.
The very first event at the facility, in fact, was a good old-fashioned church revival. The Greater Southwest Billy Graham Crusade served as a ten-day christening of the stadium in September 1971, with Johnny and June Cash, former president Lyndon Johnson, and Coach Landry all in attendance. Over 450,000 people came.
The lots around the stadium were used occasionally as a drive-in movie theater during the offseason.
Texas Stadium made cameo appearances in many film and television productions. Walker, Texas Ranger shot scenes at the stadium frequently. Eagle-eyed viewers will also spot the building in the TV series Friday Night Lights and the 1999 feature film Any Given Sunday. Most famously, the stadium appeared in the opening credits of the primetime soap opera Dallas for its entire thirteen-season run on CBS.
Several major musical acts played Texas Stadium over its lifespan. The Jacksons, Madonna, Guns N’ Roses, Dave Matthews Band, Shania Twain, and Metallica all played the arena. When Garth Brooks came to Texas Stadium for a 1993 NBC special, special rigging had to be installed over the iconic hole in the roof so that Brooks could perform a stunt where he “flies” over the audience while suspended by a trapeze harness.
Many of those non-traditional events hosted at the stadium in later years came during the ownership of Jerry Jones, who used the place in ways that the previous caretakers could never have imagined. Murchison may have built Texas Stadium with the future in mind, but Jones was intent on actually taking it there.
New ownership, new plans
Jerry Jones had started talking about plans to give Texas Stadium a massive facelift as early as 1994, during the team’s remarkable Super Bowl stretch. Barry Switzer had led the team to another championship as Cowboys coach, and Jones was suddenly eager to take the club’s home stadium to the next level as well. The facility had gotten old, and it no longer seemed a fitting home to the best team in football.
When Jones bought the Cowboys and the Texas Stadium lease in 1989, both were in need of an overhaul. On the night he agreed to the deal, Jones reportedly went to the stadium and lay down on the 50-yard-line. Staring up through the hole in the roof, he started formulating a plan to bring both the team and the stadium back to glory.
It took four seasons to take the team from worst to first. The building they played in would prove to be a much harder task.
Jones envisioned an entertainment-and-office complex surrounding the stadium, to which he would add expanded seating to accommodate 100,000-plus and even finally install a retractable roof over the signature hole. The ultimate hope was for Dallas to host a Super Bowl of its own; this $350 million renovation would make it happen.
IRVING, UNITED STATES: Dallas Cowboy wide receiver Michael Irvin (C) announces his retirement from football at Texas Stadium 11 July 2000 in Irving, Texas. Irvin will join Fox Sports Net as a football analyst. Flanking Irvin is Cowboys’ owner Jerry Jones (L) and head coach Dave Campo (R). AFP PHOTO/Paul BUCK (Photo credit should read PAUL BUCK/AFP via Getty Images)
But changes to Texas Stadium had started almost immediately after Jones purchased the team and facility back in 1989. Vacant luxury boxes were leased, turning a quick $18 million profit. Corporate advertising appeared around the venue for the first time, something Schramm had considered “beneath” the franchise. Jones signed separate sponsorships for the stadium (rather than the team) to avoid having to share that revenue with other clubs. Personal-seat license fees went up. Complimentary season tickets given out to former players, staff, and friends were taken back for resale. Jones persuaded the city council to allow beer and wine sales for the first time. He put up a giant party tent outside the stadium and charged admission to “The Corral” on gameday.
Jones had spent a small fortune on the team. Now he was intent on making a small fortune from their home stadium, in order to spruce it up.
But by 2003, it was clear that those upgrades wouldn’t happen. The no-man’s-land around the stadium had never been developed, and the decision-makers in Irving were unwilling to fund Jones’s pie-in-the-sky ideas. In fact, a study requested by the city council had shown that the Cowboys brought in just $51 million a year in economic benefits to Irving. When fans came to the games, they spent most of their money at the stadium itself or outside the city limits. The Cowboys may have been a crown jewel for Irving, but they weren’t a cash cow. And they certainly weren’t worth an up-front investment of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Jones would look elsewhere to build his palace. Texas Stadium’s days were officially numbered.
Demolition day
And so it came to be that on April 11, 2010, 11-year-old Casey Rogers from the nearby town of Terrell, wearing an oversized hardhat, had his finger poised over the button that would detonate over a ton of explosives and reduce one of professional football’s most iconic structures to rubble.
After the obligatory countdown, the moment arrived with a flashes of bright light from inside the stadium, accompanied by a series of percussive echoes. The ground started to shake, and as a cloud of smoke blossomed out from around the structure, Texas Stadium fell in a carefully choreographed sequence. It took less than 30 seconds from start to finish.
“Awesome!” young Rogers exclaimed. “It was better than I thought it would be.”
IRVING, TX – APRIL 11: Texas Stadium, the former home of the Dallas Cowboys is imploded on April 11, 2010 in Irving, Texas. (Photo by Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)
But it was a surprisingly dramatic moment for some who had come to view Texas Stadium as more than just a local sports arena.
“It was much more emotional than I expected,” said Pam Seal, a former Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader who had come from Mesquite to bid a final farewell. “I’m so glad that I had my family out there to hold my hand through it. I didn’t think I would be that much of a basket case about it. It was like saying goodbye to an old friend.”
Once the dust from the explosion cleared, a striking image was left: three buttressing pillars were left standing in the debris. In place of the stadium where the legendary Triplets had risen to the top of the football world, only a trio of girders were now left to mark the spot where it had happened.
Today, the oddly-shaped parcel of land bordered by Highway 183 to the south, Loop 12 to the west, and John W. Carpenter Freeway to the east is called the “Diamond Interchange Property.” Over the years, developers have toyed with the idea of building something on the footprint of the old stadium, but nothing has come to fruition. The Texas Department of Transportation uses it now as a staging area for equipment.
Cowboys Stadium became AT&T Stadium in 2013 after a naming rights deal was struck with the telecommunications giant. With its massive video board, art galleries, gleaming architecture, gathering areas for fans, huge seating capacity, and field-level luxury boxes, it is in many regards the next-gen venue Jones had wanted to turn Texas Stadium into.
And the retractable roof that an eager Clint Murchison Jr. had wanted to put over the top of Texas Stadium? The Cowboys finally built one, and they’re now practically standard at new stadiums around the southern portion of the country. It’s been noted by many that when Jones opens the roof at AT&T Stadium, his new palace looks just a bit like old Texas Stadium.
Call it a tip of the ten-gallon hat, perhaps, to one of the great stadiums in American sports history, and an integral piece of Dallas Cowboys history.
“Texas Stadium will never become tarnished, neglected, or dishonored, but always remembered, revered, and respected, a memory that will be cherished, a place forever honored by all of us who were there,” said Alicia Landry, the coach’s widow, during that demolition weekend ten years ago. “It was a special time and a special place, for the team and for the fans, to be a part of our memories forever.”
Everything you need to know about the 2020 Scouting Combine. Plus a Wire reference.
Some of the final pieces of the pattern are about to be woven into the narrative of the 2020 NFL draft class. On Monday, the poking, prodding and non-stop onslaught of folk acting way-too-familiar will get started as the early parts of the NFL Scouting Combine commence. Save for a few “work ethics and competitive spirits” winding their way up river to a Day 3 draft-pick status, most everyone with a realistic shot of being selected is in Indianapolis for the week, or they’re on their way.
The combine has been around for almost 40 years; with data entry specialists probably plugging heights, weights and 40 times into Commodore 64s.
Dallas” Tex Schramm engineered the original Stringer-Bell-New-Day-Co-op and convinced the competition committee to “go in together so they could get the best discount on New York Package.” The consortium gathered the Lesko, Quadra and individual scouting departments around conference room table thanks to the market they all shared.
163 prospects took part in the inaugural combine in 1982.
Now each year the NFL invites every eligible draft participant deemed worthy by the scouting committees and this year the spectacle has been moved to primetime during the last half of the week.
The on-field workouts will run Thursday through Sunday, as clusters of positions go a five-day stir fry.
Here’s a look at the full schedule of arrivals and activities, courtesy of Draft Network’s Jordan Reid, which started Sunday with the quarterbacks, tight ends and wide receivers descending on Naptown.
Prior to putting the prospects through the physical ringer, team representatives and doctors take the players through psychological warfare, though things are supposed to have calmed down compared to some of the weirdo tactics previously employed.
— Interviews (each team is allowed 60 interviews in 15-minute intervals)
— Physical measurements
— Injury evaluation — Drug screen
— The Cybex test
— The Wonderlic Test
The on-field work will be televised on NFL Network live starting at 4:00 p.m. ET on Thursday and airing at the same time, through 11:00 p.m. ET for three days. Wanting to hit the bricks and get out of town, Sunday’s session is from 2:00 p.m. through 7:00 p.m.
The sessions will also be livestreamed online; through the NFL apps.
On field, there are seven basic drills every player has the opportunity to do, and then their are a series of position-specific drills which have several new additions in 2020.
The links in the heading if you want to dive into what each of these routines involves.
Quarterbacks
End zone fade routes added to routes thrown, timed smoke/now route drill
Running backs
Duce Staley drill; Inside routes with change of direction added to routes run
ELIMINATED: Pitch and cone drill, find the ball drill
Receivers
End zone fade route
ELIMINATED: Toe tap drill
Tight ends
End zone fade route
ELIMINATED: Toe tap drill
Offensive line
New mirror drill, new screen drill
Miscellaneous: Pull drills will include engaging a one-man sled instead of a bag. Inclusion of “rabbit” is eliminated in pass rush drops and pass pro mirror drill, with a coach’s hand motion changing direction of lateral slide in latter drill.
Defensive line
Run and club drill, run the hoop drill
ELIMINATED: Stack and shed drill
Linebackers
Shuffle, sprint, change of direction drill; short zone breaks drill
ELIMINATED: Pass drop
Defensive backs
Line drill, Teryl Austin drill, box drill, gauntlet drill
Everything is bigger in Texas, including the stories. But the truth behind the birth of the Dallas Cowboys is plenty wild on its own.
All heroes need an origin story. The one that goes with America’s Team is a doozy.
January 28 marks the 60th birthday of the Dallas Cowboys. On that date in 1960, the city of Dallas was granted an NFL franchise; one that would eventually evolve into a flagship enterprise for the league, the most valuable sports franchise on the planet, and one of the most recognized brands in history.
It’s difficult to imagine today’s NFL without the Dallas Cowboys.
They are a TV ratings juggernaut, a merchandising cash cow, and a year-round global empire that can often overshadow the wins and losses of the actual football season, sometimes even rendering the games themselves minor afterthoughts.
But there was a time before Jerry, Dak, and Zeke. A time before Romo and Dez. A time before Jimmy and the Triplets. A time before Staubach, Dorsett, and Doomsday. A time, even, before Tom Landry. In the 1970s, there was a popular T-shirt that read, “And on the eighth day, God created the Dallas Cowboys.”
The real story of the team’s creation is in many ways even epic and incredible.
Chapter 1: A Texas-sized flop
Before there was even a seed that grew into the idea that eventually became the Dallas Cowboys, there had to be fertile ground in which to take root. And in 1952, eight years before the Cowboys would be born, that fertile ground existed in the imagination of Clint Murchison, Jr.
Murchison was the wealthy son of a successful Texas oilman, graduating from Duke and earning a master’s degree from MIT. After Clint Sr. died, Clint Jr. and his brother took over the family business, with various moneymaking interests that included the company that manufactured Daisy BB guns, Field and Stream magazine, and, of course, oil.
A 29-year-old Murchison was one of fewer than 18,000 people in attendance on a late September Sunday at the famed Cotton Bowl, located on the Texas state fairgrounds. Taking the field were the visiting New York Giants and, for the very first time, a team called the Dallas Texans. The home team had previously been a New York club, too- the Yanks- having played in Yankee Stadium before being sold to a group of Lone Star State businessmen, relocated to Dallas, and named the Texans.
The Texans’ first game in their new home was largely unremarkable. Their only score in the 24-6 loss came after a fumbled punt return by a Giants defensive back named Tom Landry, who would go on to play a much larger role in Dallas football lore for generations.
Three more home games followed for that Texans team, all losses, and all poorly attended. The owners bailed on the club and returned control to the league. The Texans played the remainder of their 1952 schedule on the road, even their final two “home” contests. They finished 1-11 and were outscored 427-182. Almost half the roster retired for good at season’s end. The National Football League’s initial experiment in Dallas would go down in the books as a Texas-sized flop.
Chapter 2: Breaking in to the club
Everything was bigger in Texas, except the appetite for pro football. The sport itself was indeed king there, but it was played on Fridays at local high schools and on Saturdays by college kids. The NFL was a mainstay (albeit second fiddle to Major League Baseball) in Midwestern cities like Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia. It was the only game in town in tiny Green Bay. It had even ventured west to Los Angeles and San Francisco. Pro football simply wasn’t quite ready, however, to expand to the South.
Murchison, though, was enthralled. He attempted to buy the failing Texans franchise, but league commissioner Bert Bell had already agreed to sell the club to Carroll Rosenbloom, who would move the team to Baltimore and set up shop as the Colts. But the young Texas businessman sensed a whale of an opportunity.
“I wanted the fun of being able to see professional football in my hometown,” Murchison later said of his early infatuation. He turned his sights to other struggling NFL franchises, searching for one that he could buy and move to Dallas.
The 49ers wouldn’t sell. The Chicago Cardinals wouldn’t relocate from the Windy City. Murchison even came close to purchasing the Washington Redskins, until owner George Preston Marshall changed his terms at the eleventh hour and spoiled the deal. Murchison would hold a grudge over it for years.
But Clint Murchison Jr. wasn’t the only son of a Southern oil tycoon looking to put pro football in Dallas.
