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

There was a time when being quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys carried considerably less glamour.

There were no Lombardi Trophies in the lobby. No America's Team nickname. No decades of expectations attached to the star on the helmet.

In fact, when Don Meredith became associated with the Cowboys, there barely was a team.

Dallas hadn't played a game yet.

That makes Meredith's place in Cowboys history different from the quarterbacks who followed him. Roger Staubach inherited a contender. Troy Aikman became the centerpiece of a rebuilding project that would soon dominate the NFL.

Meredith arrived while Dallas was still figuring out what a Cowboy was supposed to be.

And for much of the 1960s, the answer looked a lot like him.

A Texas Star Before the Cowboys

Don Meredith was already familiar to football fans in Dallas.

Born in Mount Vernon, Texas, he starred at SMU from 1957 through 1959 and earned All-America recognition in each of his final two seasons. SMU records credit him with 3,130 passing yards and 25 touchdown passes during his college career.

The Chicago Bears selected Meredith in the third round of the 1960 NFL Draft, but his path to Dallas had already begun.

The fledgling Cowboys were determined to keep the local star away from the rival AFL's Dallas Texans. Dallas acquired his NFL rights from Chicago, and Meredith became one of the foundational players of the new franchise. The Cowboys today describe him as the first player ever signed by the organization, under a personal-services arrangement made before Dallas had even officially been awarded its NFL franchise.

But that doesn't mean Meredith immediately became Dallas' established starting quarterback.

That distinction matters.

Veteran Eddie LeBaron handled much of the quarterback work during the Cowboys' earliest seasons. Meredith had to grow into the job while the expansion franchise grew around him.

Neither process was particularly painless.

Growing Up With the Cowboys

The early Cowboys lost.

A lot.

Dallas went 0–11–1 in its inaugural season and spent the next several years trying to turn Tom Landry's systems and Tex Schramm's organizational vision into something that could actually win NFL games.

Meredith developed along with them.

He had the athletic ability, arm and personality to become the public face of a young franchise, but quarterbacking Landry's offense demanded considerably more than charisma.

Landry was cerebral, structured and relentlessly demanding.

Meredith was expressive, spontaneous and irreverent.

The relationship was complicated.

It also worked.

As Dallas accumulated talent around Meredith—including one of the fastest receivers football had ever seen in Bob Hayes—the Cowboys' offense became increasingly dangerous.

By the middle of the decade, Meredith wasn't simply the quarterback of an expansion team anymore.

He was quarterbacking a contender.

1966: The Cowboys Arrive

Everything changed in 1966.

Dallas finished 10–3–1, producing the first winning season in franchise history. Meredith had the finest statistical season of his career to that point, throwing for 2,805 yards and 24 touchdowns and leading the NFL in yards per completion for the second consecutive season.

He received the Bert Bell Award as Player of the Year.

The Cowboys weren't a novelty anymore.

They were one of the best teams in football.

And Meredith was one of the reasons why.

Dallas reached the NFL Championship Game against Vince Lombardi's Green Bay Packers at the Cotton Bowl.

The Cowboys trailed 34–27 but drove to the Green Bay 2-yard line late in the game. Suddenly, an expansion franchise that hadn't posted a winning record before that season was only yards away from forcing overtime and potentially reaching the first Super Bowl.

It didn't happen.

On fourth down, Meredith's pass under pressure was intercepted in the end zone.

Green Bay survived.

Dallas had arrived.

It just hadn't finished the journey.

The Ice Bowl

A year later, the Cowboys got another chance.

This time the NFL Championship Game was played at Lambeau Field in conditions that became part of football mythology.

The temperature was approximately 13 degrees below zero.

The field froze.

The game became the Ice Bowl.

Dallas trailed Green Bay 14–0 before fighting back and eventually taking a 17–14 lead.

And this is where an important piece of Cowboys history sometimes gets told backward.

It wasn't Meredith and Dallas making the famous final drive.

It was Green Bay.

The Packers took possession late and drove 68 yards through the frozen conditions. With 13 seconds remaining and Green Bay facing third-and-goal from the Dallas 1, Bart Starr kept the football and crossed the goal line behind Jerry Kramer's block.

Green Bay won, 21–17.

For the second consecutive season, Dallas had come within a few plays of beating Lombardi's Packers and reaching the Super Bowl.

Instead, the Cowboys acquired a label nobody wanted:

Next Year's Champions.

And the quarterback absorbed much of the frustration.

The Cost of Being the Quarterback

Modern Cowboys fans certainly understand this part.

When Dallas wins, the quarterback gets more credit than he probably deserves.

When Dallas loses, he receives more blame than he probably deserves.

Meredith learned that lesson before almost anyone.

He was popular, charismatic and recognizable—but Cowboys fans could also be brutal when the team fell short.

The pressure intensified in 1968.

Ironically, Meredith was playing some of the best football of his career.

He completed a career-best 55.3 percent of his passes, threw 21 touchdowns against 12 interceptions, posted an 88.4 passer rating, and earned another Pro Bowl selection. The Cowboys finished 12–2.

But the postseason brought another disappointment.

Dallas faced Cleveland in the Eastern Conference Championship Game and lost badly.

Meredith struggled, completing three of nine passes and throwing three interceptions before Landry replaced him with Craig Morton. Back in Dallas, Cowboys fans at the Cotton Bowl had already been calling for Morton.

Landry later made clear that he didn't believe Meredith alone was responsible for the collapse. He said he made the change because the team needed a psychological lift.

Nobody knew it at the time, but Don Meredith's career was nearly over.

Walking Away

Meredith retired before the 1969 season.

He was only 31 when the retirement was announced.

The decision surprised the Cowboys enough that Landry tried to convince him to return. Landry later summarized the situation simply: once a player loses the desire to continue playing football, there isn't much a coach can do.

That distinction is important.

It would be easy to create a neat story in which the losses to Green Bay, the physical punishment, the boos and the Cleveland defeat drove Meredith out of football.

Real lives usually aren't that tidy.

What we know is that Meredith walked away after nine seasons with Dallas, just as the Cowboys were approaching the championship breakthrough he had helped make possible.

Roger Staubach joined the organization in 1969.

Two seasons later, Dallas finally won its first Super Bowl.

Meredith wasn't there to lift the trophy.

But the franchise that did was very different from the one he'd joined nine years earlier.

He had helped make it that way.

Dandy Don's Second Act

For most players, retirement would have been the end of the public story.

For Meredith, it was almost halftime.

In 1970, he joined ABC's new Monday Night Football broadcast.

Television audiences discovered what Cowboys fans already knew: Don Meredith had personality.

A lot of it.

His broadcasting style was conversational, irreverent and funny at a time when sports television could be considerably more formal. Meredith eventually became famous for singing a line from Willie Nelson's The Party's Over when a game's outcome appeared settled.

He became part of the chemistry that turned Monday Night Football into something larger than a football broadcast.

It became television.

Meredith eventually received the Pro Football Hall of Fame's Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award in 2007 for his broadcasting career.

That's a remarkable second legacy for someone who had already spent nine seasons helping build one of professional football's most recognizable franchises.

More Than a Personality

The television career can sometimes obscure just how good Meredith was as a quarterback.

His era didn't produce the passing numbers modern fans are accustomed to seeing. Defenses could play receivers far more physically, quarterbacks received considerably less protection, and completion percentages looked very different from today's game.

Within that context, Meredith became one of the NFL's better quarterbacks during Dallas' rise.

He helped lead the Cowboys to three consecutive division championships. He won the Bert Bell Award. Contemporary Cowboys records credit him with three consecutive Pro Bowl selections from 1966 through 1968, although some older biographies list only two.

He also still owns one of the more remarkable entries in the Cowboys record book: a 95-yard touchdown pass to Bob Hayes in 1966, the longest completion in franchise history.

Dallas inducted Meredith into the Ring of Honor in 1976, alongside his longtime teammate Don Perkins.

By then, the Cowboys had finally become champions.

America's Team was taking shape.

And the quarterback who had helped carry Dallas through the years before all of that had already become a star somewhere else.

Legacy Reflection

Don Meredith never won a Super Bowl.

That makes his place in Cowboys history easy to underestimate if championships are the only measuring stick.

They shouldn't be.

Some players inherit a culture.

Others help create one.

Meredith belonged to the second group.

He was there when losing seasons were normal rather than catastrophic. He endured the growing pains of an expansion franchise, helped Dallas reach its first winning season, quarterbacked the Cowboys into their first championship games and experienced the heartbreak that came before the breakthrough.

And he did it without becoming merely another piece of Tom Landry's machine.

He remained unmistakably Don Meredith.

Funny. Talented. Complicated. Sometimes frustrated. Occasionally irreverent.

Very human.

Maybe that's why Dandy Don still fits into Cowboys history so well.

Before Dallas learned how to become champions, it first had to learn how to become a winning football team.

Don Meredith helped teach it how.