If you love the Dallas Cowboys, you will ignore this, but for other American sports fans, it's a big question: Which team should be the new America's Team?
Before we identify replacements, let's acknowledge why this question is worth bringing up. The “America's Team” mythology which surrounded the Cowboys came when Dallas was the most consistently successful franchise in the National Football League. Dallas was a poor man's version of the Bill Belichick-Tom Brady Patriots, making the NFC Championship Game nearly every year. The difference was that in the Super Bowl, the Patriots finished the job. Tom Landry's Dallas teams went 2-3 in five Super Bowls.
Nevertheless, the consistency remains remarkable these many years later. From 1966 through 1983 — 18 seasons — the Cowboys missed the NFL Playoffs exactly once, in 1974. Dallas produced 20 consecutive winning seasons from 1966 through 1985. In the middle of that 20-year run, the “America's Team” label was born. The great storytellers at NFL Films — Ed and Steve Sabol — made it happen.
NFL Films makes an end-of-season highlight film for every NFL team. In the late 1970s, NFL Films was at the height of its power and cultural resonance. In an age before ESPN (which began in September of 1979 but didn't become a media powerhouse until the late 1980s), NFL Films was a central media companion for pro football fans. The highlight films, the documentaries, and a weekly show — This Is The NFL and its predecessor, This Week In Pro Football — brought the National Football League into the living rooms of millions. The Cowboys happened to be the most consistent team in the NFL during this sweet spot for NFL Films and its ability to create a powerful and resonant cultural identity around pro football players, coaches, and teams. This is the true genesis of America's Team.
The Cowboys made five of the first 13 Super Bowls, more than any other team. The “America's Team” NFL Films video was the end-of-season highlight film for the 1978 Dallas club, the last of Tom Landry's five Super Bowl rosters in Big D.
Here is that video for the 1978 Cowboys:
Here is an NFL Films documentary — a recent one — reflecting on the legacy of the 1978 America's Team film produced by the company:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-22_hExbJk
When we consider how “America's Team” began, we are reminded that the Cowboys were supremely successful, supremely central to the story of the NFL, and supremely sexy. The cheerleaders were attractive, but the runaway success is what made the team — and Landry, and Roger Staubach, and Too Tall Jones, and everyone else — attractive.
Phrased differently, no one would have called the ‘Boys “America's Team” if they were a .500 team or close to it. The winning, combined with the imagery (“God made a hole in the top of Texas Stadium so he could watch the Dallas Cowboys play”), made the team. The imagery alone wouldn't have meant anything without being in the conference title game virtually every year, and in the Super Bowl roughly every other year.
Guess what? Those days of success are long gone in Dallas. The Cowboys were the No. 1 seed in the NFC twice this century. Each time they lost in the divisional round of the playoffs. The Cowboys haven't been to the NFC Championship Game, when they beat the Green Bay Packers to advance to Super Bowl XXX in January of 1996.
America's Team? With a quarter-century of failure redefining the franchise from 1996 through 2020, why should the Cowboys automatically retain the America's Team label? Why should this team live off a very distant past forged by different men?
Let's look at four teams which can supplant the Cowboys as America's Team:
Cowboys replacements:
4. Cleveland Browns
Let's state the obvious: The Browns — more than any other team on this four-team list — have to win at a high level to make this a realistic possibility. Any “America's Team” candidate has to be a winner. Americans don't love losers, and the Browns have done a lot of losing.
Yet, Americans also love a “rise from the ashes, pick yourselves up by your bootstraps” story, and if the Browns not only make their first Super Bowl in the coming years under coach Kevin Stefanski and quarterback Baker Mayfield, but remain an elite team for the next decade, they will craft the same rags-to-riches story the Cowboys did under Tom Landry in the 1960s. Remember: The Cowboys lost a ton of games in their first six seasons before finally getting it right in 1966. Owner Clint Murchison and general manager Tex Schramm — in a modern context — might have had no patience for Landry, who didn't win more than five games in any of his first five seasons from 1960 through 1964. Yet, everyone who was part of the Cowboys at their birth expected a long process of development. Patience was king, and that patience was rewarded beginning in 1966.
If patience was rewarded on a large scale with the 1960s Cowboys, it can be rewarded with the 2020s Browns, and give rise to a group which can capture hearts around the country and become America's Team.
3. Kansas City Chiefs
The other three teams on this list don't require much of a sales pitch. It's pretty obvious why they (as opposed to the not-yet-fully-proven Browns) would make the cut and replace the Cowboys as America's Team.
The Kansas City Chiefs reside in the Heartland of America. They have the best quarterback in the sport, Patrick Mahomes, who has the swashbuckling style of Cowboys icon Roger Staubach. They play attractive football. They are regularly in the AFC Championship Game. They aren't evil the way the dynastic New England Patriots were. Kansas City also had a long history of losing before rising to prominence. The team went 50 years between Super Bowl appearances.
Wholesome Heartland appeal. The most fun QB in the NFL. A team which wasn't a dynasty before but could enter into a dynastic period now. Yes, this is the America's Team formula the Cowboys had in the 1970s.
2. San Francisco 49ers
The NFL was rarely if ever more fun or more compelling than in the 1990s, when the San Francisco 49ers and Dallas Cowboys regularly met for the NFC championship. Summerall. Madden. Aikman. Young. Irvin. Rice. Charles Haley. Deion Sanders. Anyone who lived through this period and remembers these games will never forget it.
The 49ers are a glamour franchise, and they could certainly rule the NFC in the coming decade, establishing the kind of consistency the 1970s Cowboys did. San Francisco is one of America's signature cities with an iconic picture-postcard layout. If the 49ers became a dynasty again, “America's Team” would hardly feel like an out-of-place label.
1. Green Bay Packers
This is the one NFL team owned by a community rather than a very wealth private interest or individual. This is the small-town miracle of the NFL and pro sports. There is nothing else quite like it in America. If the Packers continue to win and make NFC title games, “America's Team” would fit.
The obvious storm brewing: Aaron Rodgers could leave, and the Packers might never be the same. As long as he is still there, however? Mom, Apple Pie, and Cheeseheads. America's Team with a Norman Rockwell twist.
POSTSCRIPT: If this was a five-team list and not four, the fifth “America's Team” candidate would have to be the Buffalo Bills. Losers of four straight Super Bowls, the Bills becoming an NFL champion in the 2020s would certainly be a phenomenal feel-good story.
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