And do they still deserve the title? Illustration by Zohar Lazar
Q: How did the Dallas Cowboys become known as America’s Team? And is that a title that they can still rightfully claim, all things considered?
A: The date was Sunday, September 2, 1979. The place was Civic Center Busch Memorial Stadium in downtown St. Louis. The temperature was 76 degrees Fahrenheit, the relative humidity along the west bank of the mighty Mississippi River was a dampish 73 percent, and the wind, barely blowing, was light at 7 miles per hour. The playing surface was Astroturf, and the game’s kickoff was set for 2 p.m. Central Daylight Time. The afternoon matchup between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Dallas Cowboys would be broadcast on CBS.
But first, before the action was to begin, there would be a televised recap of the Cowboys’ previous season, which had ended with a nail-biter of a 35–31 Super Bowl loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers. The short NFL Films production, narrated by iconic sports broadcaster John “the Voice of God” Facenda, would change the landscape of NFL marketing and publicity forever.
In his trademark dulcet baritone, Facenda began reading the script, which had been penned for him by NFL Films’ Bob Ryan.
“The Dallas Cowboys entered the season as world champions and sought to become the first team to reach the Super Bowl five times. They are the Notre Dame of professional football, a national team whose popularity extends from coast to coast. No matter where the Cowboys travel, there are always friends to greet them. Their players are heroes to the young. And their success and style has gained them a following across the United States. Cowboy goals are lofty: win the National Football Conference title and then the Super Bowl. This is usually attainable, for as their fans well know, the sum total of their stars make up a galaxy. Their record is envied and their innovations copied down to the last glamorous detail. They appear on television so often that their faces are as familiar to the public as presidents and movie stars; they are the Dallas Cowboys, America’s Team.”
The Texanist, a former professional fact-checker of a certain age, can attest to the veracity of these statements. The Dallas Cowboys, at that time, were a dominant force in both professional football and American popular culture at-large.
The latter follows the former, of course, but still, at or around the time of Facenda’s proclamation, the silver screen adaptation of former Cowboys wide receiver turned best-selling novelist Peter Gent’s 1973 book North Dallas Forty, which starred Nick Nolte and Mack Davis, had hit theaters. As well, the team’s famous cheerleaders had appeared on TV’s The Love Boat that same year. And Debbie Does Dallas, the most popular pornographic film of its time, whose plot, such as it is, focuses on a squad of Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders–like cheerleaders, was released less than a year earlier. Because of an alleged trademark violation involving the squad’s uniform, the movie famously spurred Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders v. Pussycat Cinema.
Just a couple of years before that, the cheerleaders were the subject of a poster so sultry that it outsold—at least for a while—Farrah Fawcett’s famous 1976 red swimsuit poster, which reigns as the best-selling poster of all time. The squad had also recently made an appearance on an Osmond Brothers television special, been the focus of a one-hour ABC program, The 36 Most Beautiful Girls in Texas, which aired before 1978’s season-opening edition of Monday Night Football, and starred in Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, the ABC made-for-television movie with Bert Convy, Jane Seymour, and Major League Baseball’s Bucky Dent.
Again, all of that was made possible by the simple fact that the Dallas Cowboys were dominating on the football field and, thus, were very popular throughout the country. The roster in those heady times contained such familiar names as Roger Staubach, Tony Dorsett, and Drew Pearson, as well as Harvey Martin, Randy “the Manster” White, and Ed “Too Tall” Jones, of the Cowboys’ feared Doomsday Defense—a term which was, as it happens, coined by the Texanist’s former Texas Monthly colleague Gary Cartwright. The Cowboys, by 1979, had accumulated thirteen consecutive winning seasons and would make it twenty by 1985. Postseason appearances were automatic in those days. The team had made it to five Super Bowls and won two. They were a bona fide dynasty and fronted the 1970s sporting (and more widely cultural) zeitgeist. Simply put, the Dallas Cowboys ruled.
Alas, that was then, and this is now. The Texanist doesn’t feel the need to go into great detail about the team’s slide. Suffice it to say, the Dallas Cowboys haven’t played in a Super Bowl since 1996, which was the last time they won their conference.
Does a team with such a dismal modern-era history still deserve the title of America’s Team? It’s a good question, and one that is asked often and has been argued about for what is now a long, long time.
Joe Nick Patoski, another former Texas Monthly colleague and the author of 2012’s The Dallas Cowboys: The Outrageous History of the Biggest, Loudest, Most Hated, Best Loved Football Team in America, told the Texanist that the title has held into the twenty-first century largely because of the Cowboys’ three Super Bowl wins in the 1990s, the last being the one in 1996.
“Even though the Cowboys remain the most valuable sports franchise in the world, and even though the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders remain unrivaled, the team has failed mightily in the metric that matters most—their performance on the field,” Patoski said. “The real America’s Team is likely the team that left Dallas in 1963—as the Dallas Texans—to become the Kansas City Chiefs; the team that Taylor Swift follows.”
A harsh take, perhaps, but the Texanist’s learned associate is not alone. Back in July, before the current NFL season kicked off, ESPN’s Courtney Cronin made the same case. “They haven’t been America’s Team since the last time they won a Super Bowl,” Cronin proclaimed on one of the network’s talk shows. “You know who America’s Team is? The Kansas City Chiefs.” A number of the Texanist’s friends, some of whom are themselves beleaguered Cowboys fans, have said as much.
As the Texanist writes, the Chiefs, led by Tyler’s Patrick Mahomes, boast a record of ten victories and one loss this season. The Cowboys are 4–7 and haven’t won a single game at home. The Chiefs have made the playoffs nine times in the last ten years and won three of the last five Super Bowls, including the last two. Right now, they seem poised to make it three in a row.
So are the Dallas Cowboys still America’s Team or not? It’s a fair question these days.