When the Chiefs and Cowboys kick off Thursday at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, the enticing matchup of would-be “World’s Team” and the franchise still widely known as “America’s Team” figures to be a ratings bonanza.
So much so that Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes reckoned Tuesday that the game would be played with “the whole world watching.”
Forget about the mediocre slates of the Chiefs (6-5) and Cowboys (5-5-1), records that also suggest momentous stakes for two storied franchises currently on the outside looking in at the postseason.
You can see why Mahomes feels that way: This projects to be the most-watched regular-season game in NFL history, eclipsing the 42 million who watched the Cowboys and Giants three years ago to the day.
“It’s the perfect confluence of three of the biggest brands in American culture — the Cowboys, the Chiefs and Thanksgiving,” CBS announcer Jim Nantz told The Athletic.
The harmonic convergence largely reflects a rarity:
While the Cowboys have been a Thanksgiving Day fixture starting in the 1960s and uninterrupted since 1978, the Chiefs haven’t played on this holiday since 2006.
Moreover, the teams have met only 12 times before; the Chiefs have played just two other franchises more rarely (Atlanta 11 times and Carolina eight).
No wonder this game also will mark the final NFL road stadium to be played in by Mahomes, who was in an understudy role when last the Chiefs played here in 2017. It’s a particularly apt setting for him to complete the tour since he grew up nearby and attended games there as a Cowboys fan.
That will add what Mahomes called a “surreal” element to the game.
But the connection between the franchises couldn’t be more real.
In fact, it runs so deep that you could call it synergistic.
So much so that this Thanksgiving Kansas City should be grateful for ... the Cowboys.
Because the Kansas City Chiefs, and all that they have meant here, wouldn’t exist without them.
The attachment is crudely but tellingly embodied in something seldom seen associated with an NFL regular-season game: a trophy.
“I know there’s a turducken,” deadpanned Mahomes, referring to the dish popularized by former NFL coach and broadcaster John Madden. “Is that the trophy?”
Actually, it’s the ol’ Preston Road Trophy, a whimsical memento concocted in 1998 by late Chiefs founder Lamar Hunt and introduced to Cowboys owner Jerry Jones in light of the fact each once lived on Preston Road.
“Oh, the owner’s trophy,” Mahomes said. “I’ve heard of that.”
Not that it’s much to covet in itself.
In his Chiefs practice facility office in 2013, owner Clark Hunt recalled that one of his father’s requirements for the gewgaw was that it cost less than $100.
“And I think he achieved that easily,” he said, laughing.
Though the Chiefs have possessed it since a 19-9 victory over the Cowboys in 2021, and it was back in Kansas City this week, the trophy is understood to be typically held in Hunt’s office in Dallas.
“Not sure I’ve ever seen the trophy,” Chiefs coach Andy Reid said, “but I know they have a thing going.”
Indeed, the inscription on the trophy that Jones and Clark Hunt have likened to a bird feeder says it was “created in friendship.”
A vital but hard-earned one, if you go back to the roots of the franchises, which each launched in Dallas in 1960 and epitomized the clash between the NFL and the upstart AFL formed by Lamar Hunt.
Hunt’s Texans were far more successful than the Cowboys from 1960-62, going 25-17 and winning the 1962 AFL title as the Cowboys went 9-28-3.
But through that championship season, when the Texans played on Thanksgiving at the Cotton Bowl before an announced crowd of 13,557, it became apparent that the dynamics of having two fledgling pro football teams there wasn’t sustainable at the time.
Especially so for the Texans, who were up against the establishment NFL.
“It just wasn’t working,” Jack Steadman, the longtime franchise executive who died in 2015, once told me. “It was not going to work.”
Hunt had lost at least $1.5 million to that point, Steadman said.
Competitor and visionary that he was, he came to understand that discretion was the better part of valor when it came to this enterprise — but only after considering other options.
Had he stayed put, as such a resolute man might do, Hunt’s Texans may well have gone defunct — and with that could have undone the AFL itself and the merger to come.
Or Hunt might instead have gone to New Orleans, where Steadman noted he initially seemed inclined to move.
At least up until a late-1962 meeting involving Hunt, Steadman and self-styled middle-man David Dixon at Steadman’s home. Even though Dixon was unable to deliver the provisional approval to play in Tulane Stadium that Hunt had sought, he nonetheless asked for a 25% share of the franchise in a typed agreement he had brought along.
When Hunt didn’t seem to flinch at the thought, Steadman recalled, Steadman told off the insistent Dixon.
“‘Get out of here. Mind your own business,’” he remembered saying. “‘This is between Lamar and me.’”
And soon, just in time for Kansas City’s future, Kansas City Mayor H. Roe Bartle was involved — starting with a fateful phone message that he left Hunt on Christmas Eve 1962.
Looking for a city where “we could control our destiny,” as Steadman put it, Kansas City quickly became intriguing with inducements Bartle introduced.
Next thing you know, Hunt and Steadman visited. Negotiations unfurled in such secrecy that Steadman set up incognito here and generally was introduced by Bartle as “Jack X, government investigator.”
Next thing you know, Hunt announced in May 1962 the move here of the Texans — a name he unfathomably had initially wanted to keep but thankfully relinquished.
So the Texans were on their way to Kansas City, and they became known as the Chiefs despite a “Rename the Dallas Texans Contest,” co-sponsored by The Star, in which “Mules” emerged with the most votes (272 of 4,866 submissions).
The potential “Chiefs” moniker earned just 42 votes.
But it became the name ever since once Steadman prevailed on Hunt that “we’ve got to name this thing after Roe Bartle” — who had the nickname “Chief,” a story in itself.
As they prepared to leave Dallas, Michael MacCambridge writes in his biography of Hunt, Steadman set up a meeting with Tex Schramm of the Cowboys to inquire as to whether they might wish to buy the Texans’ temporary locker facility built on the grounds of their practice field.
As it happened, the Cowboys not only bought the facility but quietly agreed to pay the Texans’ moving expenses to leave town.
A move that set in motion all the circumstances embodied in this year’s Thanksgiving matchup:
A few years later, Schramm called Hunt on behalf of the NFL to propose a potential merger between the leagues.
The last game before that became a reality featured the Chiefs beating the Vikings in Super Bowl IV.
The Cowboys would go on to win five championships, the last of which came months after Mahomes was born in 1995, before the Chiefs returned to the so-called ultimate game. They’ve now won it three times in the last six seasons.
All in all, making now for two of the best-known brands anywhere.
All because Dallas wasn’t big enough for both of them, a tie that both was severed and forever binds them.