Limbo Teams: The Dallas Texans
By Stephen Turk
Naming a team can be a tough endeavor. Previous posts here have dealt with the various processes that take place in giving a team an identity. Some names, however, just don’t seem to work out, as if the name itself dooms the team to failure. It seems kind of silly, but it isn’t totally without merit, those in the sports world are a superstitious bunch. The Texans seems to be one such name.
There is a current team, the Houston Texans, who entered the NFL in a recent expansion. They have struggled in their years of existence, and I can only hope for Houston fans that these current Texans fare better than the Texans of old.
There are several iterations of Dallas Texans and both of them are fairly short histories, the first of which being the NFL Dallas Texans. The team was the displaced New York Yanks and played for one season, 1952. The Yanks’ owner had become frustrated with eight years of losing and sold the team back to the league. It was then bought up by a group of Texas investors. The assumption was that Texas, with its rich high school and college football pedigree, would be a natural fit for what would hopefully become a successful pro-football franchise.
The team brought its losing ways with it, however, and was terrible. The team had minimal draw and lost games, providing little reason for Dallas residents to shift interests from the far more attractive college games. Indeed, things got so bad that the team had to sell itself back to the league with five games remaining, unable to meet payroll demands.
An overview of the team’s history can be found here: http://www.profootballhof.com/history/decades/1950s/dallas_texans.jsp
The team itself had better days ahead of it, however, as they were sold to Baltimore. After a rough couple of seasons the team developed into a powerhouse, essential to eventual success of the NFL.
1960 brought two brands of pro-football back to Dallas yet again, the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, and the AFL’s Dallas Texans. Why the creator of the AFL, Lamar Hunt, decided to name his team after a team that failed in every way imaginable, I do not know. But, the world of professional football was very different in 1960 than it had been in 1952. Television was making a big difference, and perhaps this time around there was room for more football in football crazy Texas.
Interestingly enough, during the years that the Texans were in Dallas, they were much better than the 
Cowboys. In their inaugural year, the Cowboys failed to win a game (tying was the best they could muster), while the Texas went 8-6. The Cowboys couldn’t even post a winning season until 1966, while their AFL compatriots continued to improve, winning the championship in 1962, their last year of existence. The Cowboys were in the much better supported NFL, though, and were likely more protected even with their losing.
Despite being a key founding team in the AFL and winners at that, the Texans of new faced the same problem the Texans of old faced, attendance. Their championship year saw them pull an average of only 22,118 spectators. Hunt decided they could do better elsewhere and the team was moved to Kansas City. The nickname Texans was changed to Chiefs, and the uniforms remained unchanged, save a new logo on the helmets. Initially the change was a not kind to the teams performance, but the franchise would get good again, famously playing, and losing to, Green Bay in Super Bowl I. They would return to beat Minnesota in Super Bowl IV, the last before the AFL disappeared forever.
And when everything else moved on, with that switch to the Chiefs in 1963, the AFL Dallas Texans (though infinitely better) joined the NFL Dallas Texas in that disembodied limbo of stats and discontinued uniforms. The Texan nickname has new life now in Houston (who incidentally have a limbo team of their own, the Houston Oilers who would later become the TennesseeTitans), so for their sake, hopefully they will not join their fellow Texans in obscurity. But again, the world of pro-football is a very different place today than it was before.
AFL info from Remember the AFL
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