A Texas New Year’s Tradition: The Cotton Bowl Classic (Dec 31, 2023)

by Scott Sosebee

Texans have a passionate and pronounced love affair with football. High School football on Friday sometimes draws almost entire towns to the local stadium, the college games on Saturday, along with their pomp and pageantry, keep Texan eyes glued to their television sets, and Sunday’s professional games make every fall day seem like a holiday. Yes, Texans love football, but long before the Cowboys or the Texans—and the Oilers, for those of us who still reminisce about that franchise—came into existence, it was college football that ruled the weekend and the workplace talk on Monday. The state fell in love with the college game after the birth of the Southwest Conference in 1914, and although the SWC struggled for years, the prestige and prominence of the conference grew exponentially in 1940 when the Southwest Conference struck a deal with the Cotton Bowl Classic—a New Year’s Day College “Bowl” Game—to match the conference champion every year against a top national squad. The relationship made the Southwest Conference a “power” alignment in national collegiate football, but it symbiotically made the Cotton Bowl one of the “major bowls” of the college football milieu, and the game quite often decided the mythical “National Championship” of the pre-college playoff era.

The Cotton Bowl Classic game gave its name to and was identified with the Cotton Bowl Stadium in Dallas’ Fair Park, the location of the State Fair of Texas. The site of the current stadium housed a field in the 1890s, but the rickety stadium first constructed there for a prize fight was in great disrepair when the city of Dallas built a new 15,000-capacity stadium on the site in 1921. The stadium was only used for sporadic community events and the occasional SMU football game. That began to change in 1930 when Dallas wanted to get a jump on other Texas cities in hosting the state centennial celebration in 1936. The city authorized the construction of a 46,000-seat stadium on the site to be called the Fair Park Football Stadium. It was completed in an incredible seven months and hosted its first football game between SMU and TCU on October 26, 1930. It became the centerpiece of the Texas Centennial Exposition in 1936, hosting both the fair’s Cavalcade of History and President Franklin Roosevelt’s congratulatory speech to over 40,000 spectators.

Fair Park Stadium was a centerpiece for Dallas, but after the Centennial Exposition, the city had few events scheduled for its shining edifice. The stadium only had two scheduled football games—the annual rivalry between Texas and Oklahoma (first played there in 1936) and the State Fair Classic between HCBU’s Grambling and Prairie View A&M, which had been played at Fair Park since 1925. A lack of vision can often hamper the progression of a city, but into such voids often step creative individuals. Oil company executive J. Curtis Sanford had an idea to emulate Pasadena, California’s Rose Bowl, a successful gambit of civic boosterism that matched up the two most prominent college squads in the nation every year as part of the city’s Tournament of Rose’s Parade celebration. Sanford formed a committee, rented Fair Park Stadium, and out of his own pocket funded all expenses for the game. The first Cotton Bowl Classic on January 1, 1937 matched the undefeated TCU Horned Frogs, a contender for the so-called National Championship, against unheralded Marquette, then known as the “Golden Avalanche.” The interlopers from Milwaukee shocked the Horned Frogs 16-6 in front of a disappointing audience of just 17,000. Sanford lost $6,000 on that first game and in the next three years he lost an estimated $100,000 on the game, which began to informally be known as “Sanford’s Folly.” Despite the losses, Sanford persevered and struck an agreement with the Southwest Conference in 1940 for their Champion to appear every year in the Cotton Bowl. The next year, the 1941 game between Texas A&M and Fordham filled the stadium for the first time.

The World War II years were challenging for the game, but after the war, the game turned a corner to profitability and prominence. Dallas’ Mayor Woodall Rogers convinced the city’s voters to support a bond issue that expanded the capacity of the stadium, and also changed the name of the stadium, officially, to the Cotton Bowl. Two more expansions in the next five years brought capacity to over 75,000, making it one of the largest in the nation. The Cotton Bowl truly became classic and the list of games staged over the next four decades would include numerous contests with national implications. The 1954 game between Rice and Alabama featured the Crimson Tide’s Tommy Lewis’ leaving the bench and tackling Rice’s Dickie Moegle after he was in the clear for a touchdown. Syracuse, in 1961, defeated an undefeated University of Texas team that was significant for the racial taunts and slights directed toward Orangemen star Ernie Davis both on and off the field. Three years later the Longhorns gave Coach Darrel Royal his first National Championship when they beat Navy, led by Heisman winner Roger Staubach, 28-6. Later, in the 1970 game, UT won Royal his second title when his Longhorns beat Notre Dame 21-17 to become the last all-white football team to finish the season ranked #1.

The 1980s were difficult for the Southwest Conference and thus the Cotton Bowl. The conference was beset by scandal as 6 of its members violated NCAA rules, culminating with SMU earning the “Death Penalty” for multiple and blatant violations in 1987. Other conferences used the disgrace to out-recruit the SWC members, diluting the quality of play until finally the conference had no choice but to break up. The last Cotton Bowl to feature the SWC Champion was played on Jan. 1, 1995. Texas Tech represented the SWC, fittingly because Texas A&M, which had finished first, was ineligible due to recruiting violations. The University of Southern California mauled the Red Raiders 55-14, and the SWC limped into an alignment with the Big 8 to create the Big 12. The Cotton Bowl is still played, but it is in Jerry Jones’ palace to himself in Arlington, and it is part of the larger college playoff system. It just is not the same.

The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee is a Professor of History at Stephen F. Austin State University and the Executive Director of the Association. He can be contacted at sosebeem@sfasu.edu; www.easttexashistorical.org.