The Dallas Cowboys, who visit the Browns at 4:25 p.m. Sept. 8 at Cleveland Browns Stadium to open the regular season in a nationally-televised game on FOX in the broadcasting debut of some guy by the name of Tom Brady (perhaps you’ve heard of him, have been good just about every year for almost the last six decades.

Yes, you read that correctly, six decades. That’s probably why they’ve been called “America’s Team” for years.

In some seasons, the Cowboys have been better than others, of course, going from being the team to beat in the NFL all the way down to sneaking into the playoffs on tie-breakers. But overall, they’ve been “in the conversation” when it h the comes to being contenders.

And that run started when the Cowboys finally figured out a way to beat the Browns and get past them in the Eastern Conference in the last years of the original NFL before its full merger with the AFL in 1970.

The Cowboys came into the NFL as an expansion team in 1960, and, to the surprise of absolutely no one because this is how these things work, the Browns, along with every other team, owned them right from the start.

When the Browns and Cowboys were preparing to meet on Nov. 24, 1966 at the Cotton Bowl in the first of the long series of Thanksgiving Day games the club is still hosting to this day, Cleveland had won 11 of the first 12 meetings, including just a month earlier at Cleveland, 30–21. The Cowboys desperately needed to change that, for there was a whole lot riding on this game. The teams were in a virtual tie for first placeand with just three more weeks left, the winner would be in the driver’s seat for the conference title.

Before 75,504, which still stands as the largest crowd ever to see the Cowboys play at the Cotton Bowl, they won 26–14. The Cowboys went on to win the Eastern title and got into the playoffs for the first time in their then very short history.

The following season, 1967, the played teams at Cleveland in the opener and the Cowboys won there for the first time, 21–14. They made it a clean sweep for the season, and got their third straight win overall ovef the Browns, by a lopsided 52–14 score in the Eastern Conference Championship Game.

The Cowboys have gotten over the top and although the Browns stole the power back briefly from the Cowboys in 1968 and ‘69, the page had turned and Dallas was on its way. 

And well over a half-century later, the Dallas Cowboys are still on that roll.

Steve King