When Were the Dallas Cowboys Founded? The Origin Story
The Dallas Cowboys were founded in 1960, with the NFL awarding Dallas its 13th franchise on January 28 of that year. Clint Murchison Jr. led the ownership group, with Bedford Wynne as his partner, while Tex Schramm, Tom Landry, and personnel executive Gil Brandt built the football operation from scratch.
The date is straightforward. The circumstances were anything but. Dallas entered the NFL amid a bitter fight over a Washington fight song, changed its working name twice before playing a single down, and had to build its entire inaugural roster from players other teams made available — a roster that went on to finish the season without a win.
If you’ve ever typed “when were the Dallas Cowboys founded” into Google mid-argument with a friend, you already have the year covered. The more interesting stuff — why the NFL wanted a team in Texas in the first place, why Dallas almost played its first season under a completely different name, and how a winless expansion club turned into the most valuable franchise in American sports — is what actually explains how the Cowboys became the Cowboys.
When Were the Dallas Cowboys Founded?
The Dallas Cowboys were officially founded on January 28, 1960, when NFL owners voted at their annual league meeting in Miami Beach to award Dallas the league’s 13th franchise. Clint Murchison Jr. was the principal owner, with Bedford Wynne as his ownership partner, and the franchise fee was $600,000 — a figure that looks almost absurd next to the Cowboys’ $17 billion Forbes valuation heading into the 2026 season, the highest of any team in the NFL for the 20th year running.
Here’s the quick-reference version for anyone who just wants the answer to “when were the Dallas Cowboys founded” without the full backstory:
| Fact | Answer |
|---|---|
| Founded | January 28, 1960 |
| League | NFL (13th franchise) |
| Franchise fee | $600,000 |
| Home stadium (1960) | Cotton Bowl, Dallas |
| Principal owner | Clint Murchison Jr. |
| Ownership partner | Bedford Wynne |
| First head coach | Tom Landry |
| First general manager | Tex Schramm |
| First personnel executive | Gil Brandt |
| Working name candidates | Dallas Steers, Dallas Rangers |
| Official name adopted | April 8, 1960 |
| First-season record | 0–11–1 |
| 2026 franchise valuation | $17 billion (Forbes) |
Want the fuller version of how that franchise grew from here? Our Dallas Cowboys franchise history guide covers the decades in between.
Why Did the NFL Put a Team in Dallas in 1960?
Dallas wasn’t an obvious pick on paper. Texas was growing fast and football-obsessed, but the NFL hadn’t shown much interest in claiming it — until a competitor forced its hand.
George Halas, the Chicago Bears owner who chaired the NFL’s expansion committee at the time, had initially resisted adding a 13th team. What changed his mind was Lamar Hunt. Frustrated by the NFL’s reluctance to expand, Hunt started organizing a rival league, the American Football League, and planned to put one of its charter teams — the Dallas Texans — in the same city. Rather than hand an entire market to a startup league, Halas and the other NFL owners moved to plant a team of their own in Dallas first.
That still left one obstacle: Washington Redskins owner George Preston Marshall. Marshall had held a virtual monopoly over pro football in the American South for three decades and had no interest in inviting a Dallas franchise into the league. According to reporting from The Dallas Morning News and the book Hole in the Roof, Murchison found leverage in an unlikely place — he quietly bought the rights to the Redskins’ fight song, “Hail to the Redskins,” after its songwriter had a falling-out with Marshall. Murchison then offered a trade: his vote for expansion in exchange for the song’s rights. Marshall agreed, and the deal helped clear the NFL’s path into Texas.
Who Founded the Dallas Cowboys?
Ask “who founded the Dallas Cowboys” and most casual accounts name one guy. The real answer involves at least four people, each doing a different job.
Clint Murchison Jr. was the principal owner and put up the bulk of the $600,000 franchise fee. The son of Texas oil magnate Clint Murchison Sr., he’d been chasing an NFL team in Dallas for years before the league finally said yes.
Bedford Wynne was Murchison’s ownership partner from day one — the franchise was a two-man financial commitment, not a solo venture, even though Murchison’s name is the one that tends to get remembered.
Tex Schramm ran the front office as general manager. He came to Dallas from a public-relations role with the Los Angeles Rams and spent the next three decades building the Cowboys’ business and scouting operations.
Tom Landry was the first head coach, hired in 1960 on the strength of his defensive coaching background with the New York Giants and his Texas roots. He stayed in that job for 29 seasons.
Ownership, front-office leadership, and coaching were three separate roles held by three separate people — worth knowing if you actually want to understand how the Cowboys came together, not just whose name was on the check.
The Dallas Cowboys Almost Had a Very Different Name
This is the part most quick answers skip, and it’s one of the stranger footnotes in NFL branding history.
When the franchise was first organized, the working name on internal paperwork was the Dallas Steers. It didn’t survive contact with the front office — a steer is a castrated bull, and pinning that image on a team trying to project toughness was a hard sell almost immediately.
The next attempt was the Dallas Rangers, borrowing from the state’s law-enforcement folklore. There was just one problem: a minor league baseball team in Dallas already used that name. Murchison had reportedly been told in 1959 that the baseball club was folding, which is why he felt free to reuse “Rangers” for his football team. When the baseball owners reversed course the following year, Murchison agreed to rename his franchise instead, to avoid confusing two teams playing under the same name in the same city.
On April 8, 1960, the organization settled on the Dallas Cowboys, and it stuck — literally. A few years later, once the baseball Rangers had relocated out of state, Murchison floated bringing the name back for his football team. Fans weren’t having it: the story goes that his office received more than a thousand calls, and almost all of them wanted to keep Cowboys.
What were the Dallas Cowboys originally going to be called? The Dallas Steers, then briefly the Dallas Rangers, before the franchise settled on Cowboys in April 1960.
Why Did the Cowboys Miss the 1960 NFL Draft?
Here’s a detail most quick answers skip entirely, and it explains a lot about what happened next: Dallas never got a normal rookie class to build around.
The NFL held its 1960 college draft before it had voted to award Dallas a franchise, so the Cowboys simply weren’t in the room when it happened. Instead of drafting players, Dallas assembled its inaugural roster from an expansion pool of 36 players made available by the league’s 12 existing clubs — three per team, and rarely anyone’s best player. The Cowboys didn’t make their first actual draft selection until 1961, when they used it on Texas Christian defensive tackle Bob Lilly, who went on to become the first player inducted into the team’s Ring of Honor and a Pro Football Hall of Famer.
How Landry, Schramm, and Brandt Built the New Franchise
Winning a vote at a league meeting gets you a franchise. It doesn’t get you a team. That part fell to a trio that would run the Cowboys for the better part of three decades: general manager Tex Schramm, head coach Tom Landry, and a young personnel executive named Gil Brandt.
Brandt is one of the more overlooked figures in the early Cowboys story. According to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, he was among the first talent evaluators in professional football to use computer analysis for scouting and player grading, and his approach to organizing prospect data later helped shape what became the modern NFL Scouting Combine. That system gave Dallas a way to find and compare talent most other teams weren’t using yet — including players other clubs had overlooked entirely. Landry, meanwhile, was laying down the defensive philosophy — the “flex” defense — that would define the franchise for decades. None of it paid off in year one. All of it built the foundation for what came after. Fans who want the fuller arc of how ownership and front-office power shifted over the decades can check our Dallas Cowboys ownership history breakdown.
What Happened During the Cowboys’ First Season?
The Cowboys finished their inaugural 1960 season with a 0-11-1 record, playing all 12 other NFL teams once as a “swing” team since the league didn’t yet have a division slot built for a 13th franchise.
Did the Dallas Cowboys win a game in their first season? No. Dallas went 0-11-1 in 1960, finishing last in the Western Conference.
The 0-11-1 record needs context. Dallas had no 1960 draft class, no returning roster, and had to assemble its lineup entirely from the expansion pool described above. Given those constraints, a winless debut wasn’t much of a surprise. Dallas got its first win in 1961, beating the Pittsburgh Steelers, and posted its first winning season in 1966 — a 10-3-1 record that opened a stretch of 20 consecutive winning seasons running through 1985.
From Expansion Team to NFL Powerhouse
The next several years were a grind. Dallas improved steadily through the mid-1960s, broke through in 1966, and by the 1970s had turned into a championship-caliber organization, winning its first Super Bowl and building a national following that outgrew Texas fast. What started as a roster assembled from other teams’ spare parts became a program built around Landry’s coaching system, Schramm’s front-office structure, and Brandt’s scouting network — a combination other franchises spent years trying to copy.
How the 1978 Season Gave the Cowboys Their “America’s Team” Identity
“America’s Team” isn’t a nickname the Cowboys came up with, and it has nothing to do with 1960. It comes from a specific NFL Films highlight video covering the team’s 1978 season. Producer Bob Ryan is credited with writing the line — noting that Cowboys fans showed up in force at road games no matter where Dallas was playing — which narrator John Facenda delivered as: the Cowboys’ faces were as familiar to the public as movie stars, and they were, simply, “America’s Team.” The name stuck immediately and has followed the franchise ever since.
The connection back to the founding is really about the distance traveled: an expansion team whose following was initially concentrated in North Texas had, within two decades, become the team NFL Films singled out as the most nationally recognized in the league. For more on how that identity evolved, see how Cowboys became America’s Team.
Why 1960 Still Matters to Cowboys Fans Today
Ask a longtime Cowboys fan why the founding year matters and you won’t get a history lecture — you’ll get pride. “Established 1960” shows up on throwback gear, gets pulled out during anniversary seasons, and works as shorthand for a fan base that predates every player currently on the roster. Vintage navy-and-silver designs and old-school typography tap into that same instinct: wearing a piece of the origin story instead of just this year’s lineup.
How 1960 Became Part of Cowboys Fan Style
Heritage designs hold up best when the historical reference is recognizable without overwhelming the graphic — a founding year, a piece of period-accurate typography, or a restrained nod to the classic color scheme, rather than a design chasing whatever’s trending this season. That’s the same idea behind “Est. 1960” graphics: they point back to the franchise’s actual beginning rather than any single player or season, which is part of why the look works for tailgates, watch parties, or a gift for the fan who already knows the Steers-to-Rangers-to-Cowboys story.
At TeeMam, our vintage-inspired Cowboys collection is built around that same idea — designs that reference where the franchise actually started, not just whoever’s on the roster this season.
The Dallas Cowboys’ Founding Story at a Glance
| Year / Period | Milestone |
|---|---|
| January 28, 1960 | NFL awards Dallas its 13th franchise |
| Early 1960 | Roster built from a 36-player expansion pool; no college draft available |
| March–April 1960 | Team name shifts from Steers to Rangers, then settles on Cowboys |
| 1960 season | Cowboys finish 0-11-1 in their inaugural year |
| 1961 | Dallas records its first franchise win; Bob Lilly becomes its first official draft pick |
| 1966 | Cowboys post their first winning season (10-3-1), opening a run of 20 consecutive winning seasons through 1985 |
| 1978 | NFL Films’ Bob Ryan writes the line that becomes “America’s Team” |
| 2026 | Forbes values the franchise at $17 billion, the highest in the NFL |
Key Questions About the Cowboys’ Founding
When were the Dallas Cowboys founded, exactly?
The Dallas Cowboys were founded on January 28, 1960, when the NFL awarded Dallas the league’s 13th franchise at its annual meeting in Miami Beach.
Who were the original owners of the Dallas Cowboys?
Clint Murchison Jr. was the principal owner, with Bedford Wynne as his ownership partner. Tex Schramm ran the front office as general manager — a separate role from ownership.
Who was the first Dallas Cowboys head coach?
Tom Landry was the first head coach. He was hired in 1960 for his defensive coaching background with the New York Giants and his Texas roots, and he stayed in the job for 29 seasons.
What was the Dallas Cowboys’ original name?
The franchise was briefly called the Dallas Steers, then the Dallas Rangers, before officially adopting the Cowboys name on April 8, 1960.
Did the Cowboys win any games in 1960?
No. Dallas finished its debut season 0-11-1, largely because the team was built entirely from an expansion pool of players other clubs made available, with no college draft picks of its own.
Why are the Cowboys called America’s Team?
The nickname dates to 1978, not 1960. NFL Films writer Bob Ryan is credited with the line for a highlight film covering that season, and narrator John Facenda’s delivery of it made the name stick.
Why the Cowboys’ 1960 Origin Still Matters
The short answer to the question of “when were the Dallas Cowboys founded” is 1960 — specifically, January 28, 1960, when the NFL awarded Dallas its 13th franchise. Murchison and Wynne put up the money and outmaneuvered league politics to get a foothold in Texas. Schramm, Landry, and Brandt turned a roster built from other teams’ spare parts into an organization with a real identity. The name itself got scrapped twice before landing on something that became iconic. And the 0-11-1 debut season, rough as it was, marked the starting line for a franchise that would spend the next six decades building toward a $17 billion valuation and a nickname — America’s Team — that had nothing to do with where the story began.
Sources: Dallas Cowboys official franchise history, Pro Football Hall of Fame — Cowboys team facts and Gil Brandt, Forbes NFL Team Valuations 2026
Hi, I’m Olivia Bennett, a fashion and lifestyle writer at TeeMam with 6 years of experience creating content about fashion, outfits, and lifestyle trends. I enjoy sharing practical style ideas for everyday wear, game days, holidays, and special occasions, helping readers find looks that feel comfortable, fun, and uniquely their own.
