Know Your History: The Cowboys at Chiefs matchup

On Wednesday, Mike McCarthy mentioned that the Cowboys coaching staff has been watching an extra amount of film on their next opponent, the Kansas City Chiefs, due to the fact that they rarely play each other. In fact, only three other teams have played less games against the Cowboys than the Chiefs. Those three teams - the Texans, Ravens, and Jaguars - are the three newest franchises to the NFL.

That makes it even more surprising to think of how little these two have played each other considering they both had their inaugural season in 1960. And yet, only 11 games have been played between the Cowboys and the Chiefs, and only four of them coming in this century.

Of course, there’s more history here than just those 11 games. In 1960, both teams began in Dallas. Businessman Lamar Hunt had long wanted to buy the Chicago Cardinals and relocate them to Dallas, but was unable to. When he approached the NFL asking to create an expansion team in Dallas, he was turned away due to a feud between the owner of the Washington Football Team and Dallas native Clint Murchison Jr. That led not only to the creation of the Dallas Texans, but the American Football League. After trying and failing to get Giants defensive coordinator Tom Landry as the Texans’ head coach, Hunt hired Hank Stram to lead the team.

Around this same time, the aforementioned Murchison - also eager to have an NFL team in Dallas - managed to temporarily quell his feud with the Washington owner due to a song rights dispute regarding Washington’s fight song. That led to Murchison finally getting his expansion team in Dallas, resulting in the birth of the Cowboys. As we well know, Murchison was more successful than Hunt in luring Landry away from the Big Apple.

Three years later, Hunt decided to move the Texans out of Dallas, not believing the market was big enough for two teams. They landed in Kansas City, changing the team name to the Chiefs because it would be weird to be called the Kansas City Texans.

We all know what happened from there. The Cowboys had unprecedented success under Landry, later becoming known as America’s Team, and then enjoyed a second dynasty under Jimmy Johnson before falling on some (self-inflicted) hard times. Meanwhile, the Chiefs have had some successes over the years, winning the fourth ever Super Bowl with Stram at the helm. But it’s hard to compare to the success they’re currently experiencing with the duo of Andy Reid and Patrick Mahomes.

Today, the Cowboys are trying to find their own version of that lightning in a bottle. McCarthy’s hire drew several comparisons to Reid’s, and for good reason, while Dak Prescott continues to make plays on a weekly basis that are reminiscent of the eye-popping things Mahomes does himself.

This will be the first time that Prescott and Mahomes have ever faced each other. Prescott has played the Chiefs once, and it came during the 2017 season. We didn’t know it at the time, but it was the last game Ezekiel Elliott would play in before finally serving his six-game suspension that year.

Mahomes was a rookie and riding the pine behind Alex Smith, whose stellar play had marched the Chiefs out to a 6-2 start. Meanwhile, the Cowboys were winners of two straight after losing to McCarthy’s Packers put them in a disappointing 2-3 start to the year.

Prescott played great, giving one of the best performances of his career at the time, although today it would seem pedestrian for him. Dak threw two touchdowns and ran in another while Zeke added 93 rushing yards and a score of his own. The defense also came to play, with sacks from both David Irving and Taco Charlton, while Jeff Heath picked off Smith to give the Cowboys a 28-17 victory.

That win gave the Cowboys a 7-4 lead in the all-time series between these two, and while they’ve rarely played, the Cowboys-Chiefs clash hasn’t been without its highlights. In 1992, the Doomsday Defense shut out Marty Schottenheimer’s 4-2 Chiefs in the second half, a key regular-season victory that announced a team on its way to a Super Bowl victory.

Their clash in 2013 featured a rubber match that saw the Cowboys blow a halftime lead because of Jason Garrett’s decisions to take field goals over touchdowns, giving Dallas their first loss of the year. And who could forget the Miles Austin game?

As exciting as some of these previous games have been, it stands to reason that their faceoff this weekend, with both teams coming off 40 burgers the prior Sunday, should easily take the crown as the most entertaining clash ever between these two.

We discussed everything relating to Sunday’s game against the Kansas City Chiefs on our Dallas Cowboys Preview Show on the Blogging The Boys YouTube Channel. You can watch it below.

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