Don Meredith: Dandy Don and the Birth of a Winning Culture

When the Dallas Cowboys took the field for the first time in 1960 as a winless expansion team, Don Meredith was the quarterback tasked with giving the fledgling franchise an identity. A two-time All-American at SMU, Meredith arrived in Dallas as a hometown hero and spent his entire nine-year career as the face of a team that took years to become competitive. He absorbed the growing pains of those early seasons, learning the exacting, cerebral system of head coach Tom Landry while the Cowboys searched for their first winning record, which finally arrived in 1966.

That 1966 breakthrough season ended one win short of the Super Bowl, as the Cowboys fell to the Green Bay Packers 34-27 in the NFL Championship Game. The following year brought an even more painful rematch: the 1967 NFL Championship, played in temperatures of 13 degrees below zero and remembered ever since as the "Ice Bowl." Meredith and the Cowboys drove deep into Packers territory in the closing minutes, only to lose 21-17 on a last-second Bart Starr quarterback sneak. The two heartbreaking losses to Green Bay came to define the franchise's early reputation for falling just short in the biggest moments.

Off the field, Meredith's easygoing charm earned him the nickname "Dandy Don," a sharp contrast to Landry's stoic, buttoned-up sideline demeanor. Where Landry was reserved and analytical, Meredith was quick with a joke and comfortable in the spotlight, and that natural charisma made him one of the most popular players in the league even as the Cowboys chased their first title. The pairing of Landry's discipline and Meredith's personality gave the expansion franchise a public identity well before it had a championship pedigree.

Worn down by the physical toll of the position and the weight of two straight championship-game defeats, Meredith walked away from football after the 1968 season at just 31 years old, retiring while still one of the most talented quarterbacks in the game. His departure closed the book on the Cowboys' formative years and cleared the way for the championship era that followed in the 1970s, a run built on the foundation he had helped establish.

Meredith's story didn't end with his playing career. In 1970, he joined Keith Jackson and Howard Cosell as one of the original broadcast voices of ABC's Monday Night Football, helping turn the new broadcast into appointment viewing across the country. His folksy humor and Texas charm made him a national television personality, and he became famous for breaking into a few bars of "Turn Out the Lights, the Party's Over" whenever a game had clearly been decided, a signature bit that outlived his playing days in the popular imagination. Long before the Doomsday Defense made the Cowboys feared, Don Meredith made them likable, and his fingerprints are still on the franchise's identity today.