In January 1976, the Pittsburgh Steelers defeated the Dallas Cowboys 21-17 in Super Bowl X. Given the momentum behind the team, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle called up founder/owner Art Rooney Sr. with an offer: name the Steelers “America’s Team” on the league’s upcoming highlight reel. Rooney, cigar in hand, said no.

That story stayed inside the Rooney family until former head coach Dave Wannstedt let it out. Wannstedt, a Pittsburgh native who was the Cowboys’ defensive coordinator under Jimmy Johnson, walked into a Steelers head coaching interview in 1992 and mentioned “America’s team.” But Dan Rooney cut him off and told him that story about Super Bowl X.

“Pete Rozelle was the commissioner. He calls up my dad and says we’re making our highlight tape, we want to name the Steelers America’s team. That’s going to be our caption,” Wannstedt recalled the story shared by Dan. “‘The Chief, he always had a cigar. He took a puff of that cigar and said, ‘Pete, let me tell you something, we are not America’s team, we are the Pittsburgh Steelers.”

With the Chief’s (Art Rooney Sr.’s nickname) rejection, Rozelle then took the nickname to the then-Cowboys president and general manager, Tex Schramm. And Schramm said yes.

Now, Pittsburgh’s claim to that name was backed by its resume. They had back-to-back Super Bowl titles (IX and X). They also had the Steel Curtain, the most feared defense in football, locked in by “Mean” Joe Greene, Dwight White, Earnie Holmes, and L.C. Greenwood. Pittsburgh was arguably the league’s very best at the time, and Rozelle knew it when he made the call.

Rooney Sr. didn’t want the packaging. The Steelers were Pittsburgh’s team, a working-class franchise in a blue-collar, working-class city. Marketing them to the whole country missed the point entirely, as far as Rooney Sr. was concerned. That same instinct has run through the organization for decades after him.

Meanwhile, Bill Cowher, the Steelers’ head coach from 1992 to 2006, made his own version of the argument recently. On the Christian Kuntz Show, he declared the Steelers to be America’s team.

“There’s such a history there, and it goes back to the start at the top with the Chief, the Dan, and the Art,” Cowher said. “There’s such a great lineage of ownership that I don’t know. They are Pittsburgh’s team, or they are, I think, America’s team because they represent what family is all about. The core values of family, of community, of responsibility, of being a role model about doing the right thing.”

Cowher wasn’t asking for a rebrand, but making a character case instead, which is actually the better argument of the two. Former Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger had put a harder edge on it after he beat Dallas 24-19 at AT&T Stadium in 2020.

“I don’t want to take any shots at anybody, but if you didn’t know who America’s Team was, then you should’ve seen the stands and all the Terrible Towels,” Roethlisberger had said. “Dallas might be America’s Team, but we are the World’s Team.”

So Rozelle took the offer to Dallas, and Schramm took it. Then, NFL Films producer Bob Ryan put the line on the Cowboys’ 1978 season highlight reel. Ryan’s reasoning was straightforward: wherever Dallas played, the stands were full of Cowboys fans. People from cities nowhere near Texas were showing up wearing the star, and Ryan was just reporting what he saw. Art Rooney Sr. walked away from that label, and Dallas spent the next five decades proving that it fit. 

How Dallas built an identity around the name

Bob Ryan’s narration on that 1978 reel had captured the very essence of the Dallas Cowboys at the time.

“They appear on television so often that their faces are as familiar to the public as presidents and movie stars,” Ryan had written. “They are the Dallas Cowboys: ‘America’s Team.’”

Head coach Tom Landry’s Cowboys gave that label something concrete to stand on. With 20 consecutive winning seasons, five Super Bowls, and legendary quarterback Roger Staubach under center, the team was already the most-watched franchise in football before Ryan wrote that line.

That nickname held firm even when the wins didn’t. Through losing seasons, Dallas merch kept selling, Cowboys games kept landing in primetime slots, and the Cowboys Nation kept spreading. And the ESPN poll back in 2012 still ranked them the most popular team in the league. From 1990 to 1999, the Cowboys even had the most consecutive sold-out games (160).

The obvious knock on Dallas is that they haven’t won a Super Bowl since 1995 and don’t deserve the title anymore. But “America’s Team” was never about winning; it was about reach. Dallas runs its own merchandise operation and its own cheerleading brand and lands in primetime regardless of how well the team can play these days. The Cowboys are the world’s most valuable sports franchise precisely because they built a national footprint that runs 365 days a year.

The Kansas City Chiefs have been floated as the new America’s Team on multiple occasions as well. They, too, have back-to-back Super Bowl wins, and their quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, has driven the league’s biggest ratings ever since their dynasty began. They certainly make a strong case to claim the new moniker, but Dallas has held the original since 1978. Winning right now won’t reassign that brand identity built for nearly half a century.

Art Rooney Sr. turned down a caption for the Steelers. Cowboys owner / GM Jerry Jones took over Dallas in 1989 and turned it into a $13 billion franchise. The Steelers got exactly the identity Rooney Sr. wanted: local, earned, unbranded. And the Cowboys got the one Schramm said yes to. To this day, both those choices still hold.