Super Sunday, and some history

Ah! Super Bowl weekend. Of superlatives it has plenty. These include record numbers of chicken wings, chips and dip, and cases of beer consumed on one day. Even those who are not football fans tend to watch, ostensibly to see the commercials, expensively designed to reach the widest television audience of the year. Advertisers vie for 30 second spots at millions of dollars per. I could go on.

Here in Dallas, though we hosted a Super Bowl locally in 2011, our team hasn't participated in one for the past 17 years.  Our first of eight appearances (5 wins) was in 1971; the last was 1996. The Cowboys came close to appearing in the first two. But really, Dallas came close to being in the first Super Bowl in another sense.

In 1963, the Super Bowl didn’t exist. There was a National Football League, whose teams were mostly in the northeast, with a couple on the West Coast, and a three year old American Football League. The AFL was then regarded as second rate by the NFL and most of its teams’ owners.

As it turned out, the AFL was to become respectable and the leagues agreed to merge in 1966, that merger to be completed with the 1970 season. The first AFL-NFL Championship Game – the first Super Bowl, though it wasn’t called that yet – was played in January 1967. The Green Bay Packers, NFL champions after defeating the strong contender Cowboys for the NFL championship, that year defeated the Kansas City Chiefs for the "World" Championship. The Packers again defeated the Cowboys in the infamous "Ice Bowl" and went on to beat the Oakland Raiders in the second Super Bowl. In 1969, the AFL New York Jets led by quarterback Joe Namath, decisively defeated the Baltimore Colts in the first officially titled Super Bowl III.

Dallas had two pro football teams from 1960 through the end of the 1962 season: the Dallas Cowboys of the NFL and the Dallas Texans of the AFL.  But on February 9, 1963, Texans owner Lamar Hunt announced that his AFL champion team would move to Kansas City to become the Chiefs for the next season, leaving the Cowboys as the only pro-football team in Dallas. (Of course the "Dallas" Cowboys haven’t actually played home games in the city for 41 years, and their offices and practice facilities have been in the suburbs for over 30.)

Despite the league championship, the Texans had been financially disappointing to Hunt. The AFL League was then an upstart to the established NFL, the Cowboys league. The NFL was the real deal as far as pro football went in those days. Still the Texans had a loyal core of supporters, and the AFL championship was, still, a championship. Having two pro teams gave Dallas a certain status up there with New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, other two-team towns. Nevertheless, as it turned out, if we had to lose one team, keeping the Cowboys was the best. While the Chiefs, nee Texans, went on to win Super Bowl IV in January 1970. That was it. The Cowboys, on the other hand were dominant during the 1970s into the early 1980s, and again in the mid-1990s.

Note: The Texans name lives on in the Houston NFL franchise, founded in 2002. The Dallas Texans who became the Kansas City Chiefs, however, were not the first team to bear that name. Dallasite Giles Miller in 1952 acquired a franchise for a new team and the roster of the defunct New York Yanks. The new Dallas Texans played their first game in the Cotton Bowl on a 105 degree day in September of that year. They lost, as they were to for every game except one, including their final one in Dallas on November 9, 1952. With attendance pathetic – only 17,500 fans showed up for the first game and less than 10,000 for the last – Miller ran out of money and returned the team to the NFL. The still named Texans moved their offices to Hershey, Pennsylvania and played their last "home" game in Akron, Ohio where they actually defeated the Chicago Bears 27-23. The remains of the Texans operation were purchased by one Carroll Rosenbloom who had obtained a franchise for his new Baltimore Colts. In 1983, the team moved team moved to become today’s Indianapolis Colts.