Cowboys

AT&T Stadium sits in Arlington with a domed roof and a video board that stretches nearly the length of the field, built to hold 80,000 on paper and considerably more once standing room opens up — a Cowboys game there drew 105,121 people, still the largest crowd an NFL match has pulled anywhere. The franchise had no such stage when it started out in 1960 as one of the league's expansion sides, and it took most of a decade under Tom Landry, who ran the sideline from that first season through 1988, before the results caught up with the ambition.

They caught up in the 1970s, when a defensive line nicknamed the Doomsday Defense anchored a team that reached the Super Bowl five times in nine seasons under Landry, and a CBS documentary crew hung the name "America's Team" on them, a label that stuck long after the series left the air. Roger Staubach quarterbacked the first of those championship runs; Troy Aikman, paired with Emmitt Smith and Michael Irvin, delivered three more in the 1990s under the ownership Jerry Jones took over in 1989.

The games that matter most still come against the NFC East: Washington above all, a rivalry regularly ranked among the fiercest in American sport, alongside long-running meetings with the Philadelphia Eagles and the New York Giants. Inside Texas, the fixture against the Houston Texans carries its own name, the Battle of Texas.

Five Super Bowl titles came out of eight appearances in the competition.