"A vote," he laughed, "electing me the nation's No. Miller told the Saturday Evening Post he considered each letter a vote. In fact, the letter writers were probably thinking that if Miller was daffy enough to invest his entire fortune in a league where 31 of the first 43 franchises had gone under, then, shoot, maybe he's dumb enough to buy our family a new car, too. "In national popularity polls, pro football ranked just above synchronized swimming." "College football was still king," Donovan, the Texans defensive tackle, wrote in his memoir Fatso. The letters reflected the NFL's standing in the American sports psyche at the time. He immediately started receiving bags of mail from people all over the country looking for a similar handout. WORD GOT OUT in early 1952 that Miller had done the unthinkable: He bought the defunct New York Yanks NFL franchise for $300,000 and was moving the team to Dallas. But on Thanksgiving Day in 1952, the Dallas Texans would produce the craziest thing of all: a football miracle. They would bankrupt the youngest millionaire in America, produce five of the most important players in NFL history, establish a new NFL standard for carousing and create an unsavory lineage to the heralded Baltimore Colts. The 1952 Dallas Texans would deal with rattlesnakes, abuse of grasshoppers (the drink) and a murder trial. After what they'd been through, the bizarre pregame gesture seemed perfectly normal. "Texans Burial Due" read the headline above the local paper's preview of the matchup between the Bears, who had just knocked off the defending NFL champion Detroit Lions, and the "hopeless, homeless, and hapless" Texans, who ranked dead last in every statistical category and spent most of their practice time fishing, playing volleyball or guzzling suds.Īnd so, roughly 1,400 miles from Dallas on Thanksgiving, after one of the most colossally bad seasons in the NFL's century of existence, a handful of the Texans climbed into the Rubber Bowl stands to shake hands with a tiny group of their foster fans. But after nine straight blowout losses and with his fanbase drying up faster than a wildcat well, Miller was forced to turn the team over to the NFL and saddle Dallas, Texas, of all places, with the ignominy of producing the last NFL franchise to fail.įirst, though, the league shipped the Texans to Hershey, Pennsylvania, and forced them to play the remainder of their season on the road, including a Thanksgiving Day game in Akron against the mighty Chicago Bears. At the start of the season, Miller, who had inherited a Texas textile fortune, wondered aloud if the 76,000-seat Cotton Bowl would be big enough for his ground-breaking franchise, Texas' first integrated football team. "I'd never give it up for a million bucks."īy that Thanksgiving game, Giles Miller, 32, the Texans' impossibly rich and brash owner, already had. "Those few months living in Dallas were some of the craziest times of my life," the late Donovan recalled after entering the Hall of Fame in 1968. "We looked like a bunch of bums," Texans defensive lineman Art Donovan told the Dallas Morning News.īy that point in the season, it was a rather generous assessment of the Dallas Texans, an orphaned group of wayward misfits that had, in one fantastic 50-day binge, turned the NFL's first attempt to field a team in the South into the worst franchise in NFL history. By the time the Texans and the Chicago Bears were scheduled to kick off, the barren, wind-swept horseshoe stadium was so cold that players constructed fires in trash cans at either end of the bench just to try to stay warm. That morning, nearly 30,000 fans had packed into the Rubber Bowl in Akron, Ohio, for a football doubleheader featuring a local high school rivalry and the NFL's traditional holiday showcase.Īt the completion of the prep game, however, roughly 28,000 of those spectators stood up en masse and returned home to eat dry turkey. OVERCOME WITH GRATITUDE before their Thanksgiving Day game in 1952, the Dallas Texans dispensed with the traditional NFL pregame introductions and, instead, scrambled into the stands to personally thank each and every one of their fans. In so many ways it seems as if it might well have been some kind of dream." - Giles Miller, 1952 Dallas Texans owner "I will be the first to admit that the story that follows reads like fiction, but I assure you it is factual all the way, even to a painful degree. Meet the miraculous, disastrous 1952 Dallas TexansĮditor's note: This story about the 1952 Dallas Texans was originally published on Thanksgiving Day 2018. You have reached a degraded version of because you're using an unsupported version of Internet Explorer.įor a complete experience, please upgrade or use a supported browser
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