From @ToddBrock24f7: A perfect home record has happened just twice before for Dallas; it has not translated to postseason success.
Mike McCarthy preaches the importance of winning home games. All of them. The Cowboys head coach has repeatedly said that if a team can win all of its home contests and at least split the road dates, they’ll generally be sitting in at least decent shape for the postseason.
But even just the first part of that equation is far more difficult than it sounds. In the 62 full regular seasons that the Cowboys franchise has been in existence, only two of those clubs have put together a perfect home slate. The 2023 edition has the chance to accomplish that feat on Saturday night when they host the Detroit Lions in the regular-season home finale.
While notching a win over the surging Lions would be exceedingly important from a morale standpoint in that it would snap a troubling two-game skid (both away games), going undefeated at AT&T Stadium would be nice icing on the year’s playoff-berth cake.
An unblemished home record, though, doesn’t seem to have much bearing on deep postseason success, especially if the team has to travel in the tournament. At least that’s the lesson the 1980 and 1981 Cowboys have to teach us.
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.
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.”
There’s no love lost between the Dallas Cowboys and Philadelphia Eagles. 1989’s Bounty Bowl didn’t start the feud, but it sure deepened it.
November 23, 1989. “Blame It on the Rain” by Milli Vanilli was the No. 1 song in the country. Harlem Nights starring Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor had just unseated Look Who’s Talking from a month-long run atop the box office. The Berlin Wall had come tumbling down two weeks prior. A gallon of milk cost $2.34. A gallon of gas was just over a buck. And, at least on the visitors’ sideline of Texas Stadium that Thanksgiving Day, the price for laying out Cowboys kicker Luis Zendejas was $200.
Saturday marks the 30th anniversary of the “Bounty Bowl,” one of the ugliest incidents in team history, an unfortunate stain on the league’s rich Thanksgiving Day tradition, and one of the most notorious chapters in one of the nastiest rivalries in the National Football League.
“Why would I place a bounty on a kicker who can’t kick worth a damn?”
The Cowboys were a dismal 1-10 entering the Week 12 game of the 1989 season; Jerry Jones had just purchased the team in February. Jimmy Johnson had replaced the legendary Tom Landry as coach. The team’s best player, Herschel Walker, had been traded away a few weeks earlier, and Troy Aikman was nearing the three-quarter mark of his rookie campaign as starting quarterback of the league’s worst squad. Hosting its annual Thanksgiving Day contest was one of the lone chances that season for the struggling Cowboys to shine before a nationwide audience. The opponent that day? The 7-4 Philadelphia Eagles, helmed by coach Buddy Ryan.
Down by a 10-0 score coming out of halftime, Dallas kicked off to open the third quarter. Moments after sending the ball deep on his first kick of the game, Zendejas was leveled by Eagles linebacker and special teams player Jessie Small. Replays seem to show that Small bypassed several members of the Cowboys coverage team to get to Zendejas. Once there, he delivered a massive blow that sent the 175-pound kicker flying and left him wobbling as he tried to stand.
In today’s game, the hit would have drawn an immediate flag, resulting in not only a penalty for the Eagles, but a stiff fine for Small from the league. But on that day in Irving in 1989, it was- incredibly enough- Zendejas who was flagged, for a low block. (In retrospect, Zendejas was clearly crouching in anticipation because he knew a big hit was coming; more on that later.) And for his bone-crunching blow, Small actually made money- directly from Coach Ryan, no less- according to blockbuster accusations leveled after the 27-0 loss by Johnson and the Cowboys.
The first-year coach claimed that Ryan had placed a bounty on Zendejas, promising a $200 cash payment to the Eagles player who flattened the kicker. Zendejas, coincidentally (or not, depending on your interpretation), had been cut by the Eagles less than a month earlier and then signed by Dallas.
Ryan laughed off the accusation as absurd.
“Why would I place a bounty on a kicker who can’t kick worth a damn?” he asked, according to Mark Eckel of NJ.com. “The guy was in a six-week slump. I wanted him in the game.”
Zendejas had, in fact, missed two field goals in Dallas’s previous game versus Miami. He did not seem to be, at least on the surface, a dangerous playmaking threat truly worthy of the personal ire of the Eagles coach.
The Dallas kicker, though, felt he had proof of the bounty. Eagles punter John Teltschik had warned him before the game that he was a target for a big hit. But there was more.
“Watch out for yourself…”
“In the days leading up to the game,” wrote Ray Didinger in a 2014 piece on the Eagles team website, “a story circulated in Dallas that Zendejas had received an ominous phone call from Eagles special teams coach Al Roberts. According to Zendejas, Roberts told him that Ryan had instructed his players to go after their former teammate.”
Zendejas claimed that upon his release in Philadelphia, he had been notified by Roberts, not Ryan directly. At the time, the kicker took to the media to voice his disappointment, calling his coach’s move “classless.”
”Buddy didn’t have the decency to tell me to my face; he had an assistant coach do it,” Zendejas said of his termination. ”When I phoned to ask him about it, he hung up on me.”
Roberts’s warning for Zendejas to “watch out for yourself” on Thanksgiving 1989 in the game that was quickly dubbed the “Bounty Bowl” was just the latest evidence of bad blood between Ryan and the Cowboys. Ryan, in fact, harbored a hatred for the rivals from Dallas ever since taking over in Philadelphia in 1986. That hatred that grew exponentially the following season.
During the 1987 NFL players’ strike, Dallas saw several high-profile members of their roster cross the picket line to continue playing. Ryan accused then-coach Landry of running up the score on his replacement players in a 41-22 win. After the strike had ended and full-time players returned, Ryan got his revenge on Dallas. He instructed his starting offense to run a fake kneeldown play – after two actual kneel-downs – in the final seconds of a game the Eagles were already leading 30-20. The ensuing rub-it-in touchdown beat the Cowboys by 17 points. In 1989, Ryan saw a chance to kick the rebuilding team when they were down, in their own stadium and on national television.
But the notion of Ryan placing a price tag on the heads of opposing players wasn’t even a new one.
“Ron Wolfley, a Pro Bowl special teams tackler for the [then-]Phoenix Cardinals, disclosed [in 1988] that he had heard that the Eagles had a bounty on him during the 1987 season,” as per a 1989 New York Times piece by Dave Anderson. He goes on to write that, in an Eagles-Bears game that same 1989 season, “similar bounties were whispered to be on Mike Tomczak, the quarterback, and Dennis McKinnon, a wide receiver,” and adding, “Ryan, who has feuded openly with Mike Ditka, also supposedly had offered a bounty if any of the Eagle players flattened the Bears’ coach on the sideline.”
To be sure, the Cowboys were well aware of the bounty rumors when they took the field that Thanksgiving Day. And Zendejas wasn’t the only Dallas player with a supposed price on his head.
“He never used the word ‘bounty.'”
In the first half of the game, Aikman was slammed to the ground by Eagles linebacker Britt Hager well after an aborted-play whistle. The hit, despite broadcasters Pat Summerall and John Madden clearly being entertained by the “fracas” that followed, necessitated X-rays for Aikman. Johnson claimed the Eagles had also put a $500 contract on his rookie quarterback.
“As far as I know, he never pointed out a guy,” Hager answered. “I never heard, ‘Go take the kicker out.’ Who would say, ‘Go take the kicker out?’ That’s why we all kind of laughed about it.”
He admitted, though, that Ryan wasn’t above at least insinuating that opposing quarterbacks were fair game for his players.
Eckel explains, “Ryan would say to me after the fact that he would tell his players at times before games, ‘I want to find out who their backup quarterback is today.” But he never used the word ‘bounty’.”
Anderson adds that Zendejas himself “spoke of having seen ”Buddy call guys out and give them $100” for what the kicker called a weekly Big Hit award but what Ryan called a Big Play award.
“Ryan acknowledged those $100 bonuses to his Eagle players, but insisted they were for an interception or a jarring tackle that caused a fumble in the context of the game, not for leveling a certain opponent.”
But, Sabin writes: “At the time, Hager and the Eagles special teams and defensive players would collect a pool of money and redistribute it for big hits, ‘decleaters,’ sacks, and turnovers. It wasn’t an uncommon practice in the NFL during a bygone era when the league’s image was less sanitized and the game wasn’t as scrutinized. In fact, the Cowboys had a similar system, according to [Dallas fullback Daryl] Johnston.
“‘There was no intent of malice,’ Johnston explained.”
But to anyone watching the 1989 Thanksgiving Day contest, there was clearly intent of malice in the Eagles hit that left a diminutive kicker staggering off the field.
Didinger, the famed Philadelphia sportswriter, had a private film session with Jimmy Johnson at Valley Ranch several days after the Bounty Bowl.
“On the film, you could see Small take a straight-line course to Zendejas. He actually ran right past Bill Bates, the Cowboys’ best special teams player, to get to the kicker who never made a tackle in his entire career.
“‘Why would he do that,’ Johnson said referring to Small, ‘unless somebody told him to do it?’
“I had to admit Johnson had a point.”
“You all know what you were doing!”
The New York Times quoted Zendejas as saying of Ryan after the Thanksgiving Day game, ”If I could’ve stood on my two legs, I would’ve gone over and decked him… We’ll play again in two weeks. If I see him then, I’ll deck him then. Honestly, I will.”
Zendejas did share words with several of his ex-Eagles teammates when the Thanksgiving game ended. Small, in fact, was overheard by Didinger telling Zendejas, ”I was just doing my job.” The Cowboys’ kicker reportedly replied, ”You know what you were doing! You all know what you were doing!” An Eagles’ trainer offered his hand; Zendejas slapped it away.
Johnson himself intended to confront Ryan right there on the field after the final gun. But the Eagles coach hurried off the Texas Stadium field, skipping the traditional coaches’ face-to-face meeting.
According to Didinger: “It was true Ryan left the field as soon as the game ended, but he did that every week. He didn’t believe in postgame handshakes. Professional courtesy wasn’t his thing.”
Johnson famously said of the moment, “Oh, I would have said something to Buddy, but he wouldn’t stand on the field long enough. He put his big fat rear end into the dressing room.”
In his response, Ryan, as he did with most things, deflected the criticism with a joke.
“I resent that,” Ryan said. “I’ve been on a diet, I lost a couple of pounds. I thought I was looking good, and he goes and calls me fat. I kind of resent that.”
The teams played again two weeks later. It was not nearly enough time, though, for tempers to have cooled. “Bounty Bowl II” had become a promoted event, and it carried the animosity into the Veterans Stadium stands, with Philadelphia fans pelting Cowboys players, NFL officials, CBS broadcasters, and even their own players with ice-packed snowballs in one of the most chaotic game environments ever seen at an NFL venue.
On the field, Zendejas was left alone, and he never went after Ryan. But Aikman took several hits during the game along with Eagles quarterback Randall Cunningham; nine total sacks were recorded in a notably physical 20-10 Eagles win. Cowboys punter Mike Saxon was also roughed up during play, drawing an unnecessary roughness flag.
“He never truly admitted it.”
As for the initial Bounty Bowl accusations, NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue- on the job just one month when it happened- followed up by interviewing a handful of players. There was even talk of a recording Zendejas had supposedly made of the phone conversation where the Eagles assistant had warned him of the bounty, but the kicker never turned over any such tape.
In the end, according to the Dallas Morning News, “the league dropped the inquiry, saying it found no ‘convincing evidence of an intent to injure any Cowboys player or to make contact with any player outside the rules of the game.'”
The 1989 season ended with the Cowboys finishing 1-15, the second NFL team to ever do so. Their league-worst record would have given them the top pick in the 1990 draft, but the team had given up that pick by taking quarterback Steve Walsh in the first round of the previous year’s supplemental draft. The Cowboys eventually traded picks with the Steelers to re-enter the first round; they selected running back Emmitt Smith 17th overall.
The Eagles came in second in the NFC East in 1989 and lost to the Rams in the wild card round of the playoffs.
Ryan never admitted to a bounty system in the years that followed, maintaining that position until his passing in 2016.
Johnson, now a FOX studio analyst, recalled Ryan’s denials in a 2014 interview.
“He sloughed it off. He never truly admitted it,” Johnson said. “I think Buddy was trying to play games. I kid him, ‘You had one of the great all-time defenses, but you never won a playoff game.’ I had the last laugh.”
Johnson’s championships may have afforded him the luxury to find humor in it long after the fact, but the Bounty Bowl saga remains a seminal part of the lore of the Cowboys-Eagles rivalry any time the franchises meet. Thirty years of hindsight has perhaps turned the original controversy into just a colorful chapter from a distant era; nothing, though, has diminished the intense dislike the two teams have for one another to this day.
