Dallas Cowboys | History & Notable Players (2024)

Dallas Cowboys, American professional football team based in Dallas that plays in the National Football Conference (NFC) of the National Football League (NFL). One of the NFL’s most successful and popular franchises, the Cowboys have won five Super Bowls and eight conference championships.

(Read Walter Camp’s 1903 Britannica essay on inventing American football.)

The Cowboys joined the NFL as an expansion team in 1960 under head coach Tom Landry. After posting a losing record in each of their first five seasons, the Cowboys quickly became one of the NFL’s better teams, qualifying for the play-offs in 17 of the 18 seasons between 1966 and 1983. The Cowboys joined the Detroit Lions in hosting an annual home game on Thanksgiving Day in 1966, a move that greatly increased the team’s national exposure. In 1967 Dallas reached the NFL championship game but lost to the Green Bay Packers in a contest that featured the lowest recorded on-field temperature in NFL history (−13 °F [−25 °C]) and became known as the “Ice Bowl.” Future Hall of Fame quarterback Roger Staubach arrived in 1969 and went on to establish the Cowboys as a perennial title contender. With Staubach the Cowboys won five NFC championships and two Super Bowls (1972 and 1978), and the popular franchise, which also boasted scantily clad cheerleaders who were both sex symbols and the targets of feminist scorn, became known by the nickname “America’s team.” Other notable players of the Landry era included defensive tackles Bob Lilly and Randy White, wide receiver and former Olympic sprint champion Bob Hayes, cornerback Mel Renfro, and running back Tony Dorsett.

Businessman Jerry Jones purchased the franchise in 1989 and fired Landry soon thereafter, earning the ire of the many loyal Cowboys fans who had grown attached to the coach in his 28 years with the team. The situation was ameliorated by the fact that the Cowboys had a string of excellent drafts at this time, acquiring future Hall of Famers Michael Irvin, Troy Aikman, and Emmitt Smith in successive drafts from 1988 to 1990. The team went on to dominate the NFL for the better part of the decade: the Cowboys of the 1990s won Super Bowls in 1993, 1994, and 1996.

The early part of the next decade saw the franchise decline as its stars retired or left for other teams. Though the Cowboys occasionally qualified for the postseason, they did not win a playoff game from 1996 until 2010, when quarterback Tony Romo—after guiding the Cowboys to a division title during the 2009 regular season—led the team to an opening-round playoff victory over the Philadelphia Eagles. Beginning with the 2011 campaign, the Cowboys posted three straight 8–8 seasons in which the team lost to a division rival in its final regular-season game to miss out on a postseason berth. In 2014 the Cowboys won 12 games—including all eight of its road games, becoming the sixth NFL team to accomplish that feat while playing a 16-game schedule—and a division title before losing its second playoff game in the following postseason. Two years later a preseason injury to Romo gave the starting quarterback job to rookie Dak Prescott, who teamed with running back and fellow first-year sensation Ezekiel Elliott to lead the Cowboys to an NFC-best 13–3 record but also to a loss in the team’s opening postseason game. The Cowboys failed to qualify for the playoffs in 2017 but returned there the following season, winning their first game but losing in the divisional round.