Dallas Texans (NFL)

The Millers believed that the growing state of Texas, with its longstanding support of college and high school football, would be a natural fit for the NFL to move farther south and west, while the team owners approved the move with an 11–1 vote.

While Giles Miller had declared "There is room in Texas for all kinds of football", the opening game against the New York Giants set the tone for the season and the franchise. While the Texans scored the first touchdown, they missed the extra point and did not score again, losing 24–6 in front of only 17,499 fans at the Cotton Bowl.

Attendance continued to dwindle as the losses piled up and the team showed no sign of being competitive: in the four games the Texans played at the Cotton Bowl, they lost all four by an average of eighteen points, and drew a total of only 54,065 fans, by far the lowest in the league. The nadir came in a November 9 game against the Los Angeles Rams, a 27-6 blowout loss which attracted only 10,000 fans.

As it turned out, this was the last game the Texans would play in Texas: unable to meet payroll or get financial support from local businessmen - an important factor even in those days - and sustaining heavy finanical losses, the Millers sold the team back to the league on November 14 with five games remaining in the season.[5]

Due to the finanical losses and woeful ticket sales, the NFL moved the franchise's operations temporarily to Hershey, Pennsylvania (though it kept the "Dallas Texans" name) and shifted the Texans' last two home games out of Dallas, thus making them a traveling team.

Program from first-ever game played by Dallas Texans in 1952

The team played one of its remaining two "home" games at the Rubber Bowl in Akron, Ohio, where the franchise tallied its only win under the Texans moniker, an upset over the Chicago Bears of George Halas, in front of a meagre crowd of only 2,208 fans on Thanksgiving Day.[6] This remains the lowest attendance at any professional football game since 1939 (excluding 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic severely limited attendance).

As a measure of how low the NFL ranked on the sports scene in the early 1950s, the Akron high school Championship Game played at the Rubber Bowl that morning attracted 14,284 fans, far outdrawing the afternoon's professional contest.[7]

Head coach Jim Phelan jokingly suggested because of the small turnout, the Texans players should "go into the stands and shake hands with each fan," while Halas had been so certain that the Bears would overpower the lowly Texans that he started only his second-string players. The Texans jumped out to a 20–2 lead and hung on for a upset 27–23 win.

With the victory, the NFL avoided having a franchise with a winless regular season, something that had not happened since 1944.[8]

The team's final game was a 41–6 blowout loss at the hands of the Detroit Lions; that game had been scheduled to be played in Dallas, but was moved to Detroit after the league took over the team, thus forcing the Texans to make their second trip of the year to Briggs Stadium. Two weeks later, the Lions won the NFL championship.

George Taliaferro, the team's leading rusher, was selected to the Pro Bowl at the end of the season.

The NFL was unable to find a buyer for the Texans, and decided to relocate the team after the 1952 season. A few months later, the NFL granted a new franchise to a Baltimore-based ownership group headed by Baltimorean Carroll Rosenbloom, and awarded it the remaining assets (including the players) of the failed Texans.[9] Rosenbloom named his new team the Baltimore Colts (after the previous team from the competing All-America Football Conference, which merged with the NFL in 1950).

The Colts (who moved to Indianapolis in 1984) do not claim the history of the earlier Triangles/Dodgers/Tigers/Yanks/Bulldogs/Yanks/Texans as their own, even though the Colts' inaugural 1953 roster included many of the players from the previous season's Texans, and a number of players from the earlier Yanks.

Likewise, the NFL also considers the new Colts to be a 1953 expansion team,[9] and does not consider the Colts to be a continuation of the founding NFL member Triangles or any other franchise. As a result, the Texans, officially speaking, are the last NFL team as of 2021 to permanently cease operations and not be included in the lineage of any current franchise.

Although the NFL rapidly grew more prosperous during the latter part of the 1950s (especially after the success of "The Greatest Game Ever Played", the 1958 Championship Game at Yankee Stadium between the vaunted New York Giants and the developing Colts, leading to a later profitable nationwide television contract), the 1952 debacle in Dallas left the NFL leery of further expansion.

Unable to persuade other NFL owners to reconsider, Texas oil scion Lamar Hunt, with others, founded the American Football League as a direct competitor to the older NFL.

When Hunt's new Dallas Texans were announced as charter members of the new league, the NFL quickly reconsidered its position on expansion, and made a second venture into Dallas in 1960, establishing what would become a far more successful team, the Dallas Cowboys (briefly known in the beginning as the Dallas Rangers: a minor league baseball team of that same name was expected to disband, but didn't, so the "Cowboys" name was later adopted for the NFL team in mid-March 1960).[10] Both franchises shared the Cotton Bowl (also the home of Southern Methodist University's (SMU) Mustangs) stadium for their first three seasons.[11]

The AFL team moved to Kansas City after winning the 1962 AFL Championship in double overtime, and became known as the Chiefs for its fourth season in 1963.

The Texans nickname was later revived by the NFL for the Houston Texans, an expansion team awarded in 2002 to fill the void left after the Houston Oilers (also a charter AFL franchise) moved to Nashville, Tennessee in 1997, subsequently being renamed the Tennessee Titans.

• Jack Adkisson, more famous as professional wrestler - Fritz Von Erich
• Joe Campanella, as Baltimore Colts' general manager in 1967[12]
• Brad Ecklund
• Weldon Humble
• Chuck Ortmann
• George Taliaferro
• Frank Tripucka
• Buddy Young
• George Young, Baltimore high school and NFL coach with the Baltimore Colts, Miami Dolphins and general manager of the New York Giants, then later NFL executive staff.

^ moved from Dallas