NFL History | Cotton Bowl, Dallas — The Championship That Stopped Ending the Season

What the Green Bay Packers won in this stadium on 1 January 1967 was not the end of their season. It was a qualification.

The two leagues had announced a merger agreement on 8 June 1966. History.com's account of that announcement says a championship game between the leagues began at the end of the 1966 season, and that the leagues did not unite their operations or integrate their regular-season schedules until 1970. So the NFL's own title game for the 1966 season was played under a condition it had not carried before: its winner had a further opponent already contracted. CBS News Texas, revisiting the fixture, wrote that the game took on new meaning because its winner would represent the league in the first Super Bowl against the AFL champion.

The ground under it was the city's. Fair Park's grounds have been Dallas city property since 1904, and a 1969 State of Texas historical marker on the fairgrounds lists the Cotton Bowl among the permanent buildings that federal, state and city governments put up there. Who held title to the stadium itself is not established here. Ground was broken in 1930 for what was then the Fair Park Bowl, on the site of a 1921 stadium, and the builders cut the playing surface twenty-four feet below the original ground level. It opened with 46,000 seats, reached 67,431 in a 1948 expansion and 75,504 in 1949. Those figures come from Lisa C. Maxwell's Handbook of Texas entry on the stadium, revised in October 2024.

Dallas came into the game 10-3-1 and first in the NFL East, per Pro-Football-Reference's 1966 Cowboys season page, which also prints the Cotton Bowl as the club's home ground for every home date that year. The same site's box score has Green Bay ahead 14-0 inside the first quarter — a seventeen-yard touchdown pass from Bart Starr to Elijah Pitts, then Jim Grabowski returning a fumbled kickoff eighteen yards — and Dallas level at 14-14 before the quarter ended, on runs by Dan Reeves and Don Perkins. Starr threw three more touchdown passes: fifty-one yards to Carroll Dale, sixteen to Boyd Dowler, twenty-eight to Max McGee. The conversion after McGee's touchdown failed. CBS News Texas gives Starr 19 completions from 28 attempts for 304 yards and four touchdowns.

Dallas answered McGee with a sixty-eight-yard touchdown pass from Don Meredith to Frank Clarke, and the margin was seven. The Cowboys reached fourth down at the Green Bay two-yard line with under two minutes left. Barry Werner's 2017 account for Fox Sports has Meredith rolling out and Tom Brown intercepting in the end zone. Green Bay had it, 34-27. Neither the box score nor any source reached for this entry printed an attendance figure for the game, and none is claimed here.

Fourteen days later the Packers played the Kansas City Chiefs at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and won 35-10. The Packers' own championship-seasons record puts the crowd at that game at 61,946. The Cotton Bowl had been built out to 75,504 seats in 1949. The two figures measure different things, one a crowd and one a capacity, and the Dallas crowd is not established here.

Three professional clubs made this their home ground and all three left it. An NFL club called the Dallas Texans played here in 1952 and moved to Baltimore the following year. An AFL club of the same name played here from 1960 to 1962 and moved to Kansas City. The Cowboys stayed until Texas Stadium opened in Irving in 1971. All three tenancies are in Maxwell's entry. Another entry in this series covers the federal statute that governs the league's pooled broadcast rights; another covers a later game in the same interleague series, at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans.

This entry describes the building as it stood when the sources cited were written; the most recent of them was revised in October 2024.

The coordinate. No reachable public record gives this stadium a point of its own. The United States Census Bureau's TIGER geocoder returns no match for the stadium's published address at 3750 The Midway, and none for Robert B. Cullum Boulevard; it does match Fair Park's own street address, 3809 Grand Avenue, Dallas, at 32.779635, -96.761973, and that is the pin. A control query on 1500 Marilla Street returned a clean match, so the geocoder was answering — the stadium's address is simply absent from the federal address file. This is one method and one record. The 1969 marker gives the fairgrounds as 250 acres, and the stadium stands somewhere within them rather than at this address, so the pin should be read as accurate to roughly 500 metres: the scale of the park, not of the building. No marker at the stadium surfaced in the Historical Marker Database either — a keyword search returned two Dallas markers, neither of them here, and the nearest marker inside the park lists eight others within half a mile, none of them this building.

Cover image: Army players taking the field before their game against Louisiana Tech at Cotton Bowl Stadium, 29 September 2013. This is a college game and not a professional one. It is here because it shows the bowl the Cowboys played in — the two decks, the mostly empty benches, and the stadium's name lettered on a wall in the stands. Photograph by Sgt. Ken Scar, 7th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment, VIRIN 130929-A-ZU930-004, public domain via DVIDS.

Second image: the same fixture under rain, looking at the press-box tower above one side of the bowl. DVIDS records the date taken as 28 September 2013 while the caption on the same page says 29 September; both are printed here and neither is resolved. Photograph by Sgt. Ken Scar, VIRIN 130929-A-ZU930-018, public domain via DVIDS.