Rangers raise their banner, Cowboys have the longest championship drought of major DFW sports teams

The Texas Rangers have raised their banner as DFW sports continue to do so without the Dallas Cowboys.

It is possible that of the non-Dallas Cowboys teams you root for, that they reside outside of the DFW metroplex. Of course, it is also possible that you are DFW through and through.

Local Cowboys fans may support the Dallas Mavericks, Dallas Stars and Texas Rangers in addition to the Cowboys as far as the major North American sports are concerned. If that is you then you have some pretty solid reasons to be happy these days with how the Stars and Mavericks are positioned with their respective playoffs looming. Not to mention that the Rangers raised a banner for their World Series victory on Thursday night (that was not enjoyable to write as a Houston Astros fan, but we all have to do what we have to do).

The Rangers secured their first world championship last fall and in the process exacerbated the drought that the Cowboys find themselves in the middle of. Since the Cowboys last earned a parade they have seen the other three major teams in town all do so. Each of the other three has also reached their respective conference championship round multiple times while the Cowboys have not at all since 1995.

Obviously we have used 1996 as the starting point for this data set given that the Cowboys’ drought began in that year. It does not take a genius to see that they are the very clear outlier with regards to their neighbors.

Every other major sports team in the DFW metroplex has now won a title thanks to the Rangers (and raised a banner which inspired this look-back). But what’s more is that each of the other three teams has merely been to their respective championship round multiple times since Dallas has.

Expanding beyond the championship round, both the Mavericks and Stars have reached their sports’ version of the conference championship game even more times without winning it. People often look at something like this and believe it reflects upon ownership. While I am not here to excuse that. it more than anything is an indication of how luck generally finds a team once or twice in an almost 30-year span.

While the conversation here is about DFW teams we could also look to the state of Texas at large and almost prove the same point. Consider that the Houston Rockets, Houston Astros and San Antonio Spurs have also all reached at least one conference championship game or equivalent. Both the Astros and Spurs have also won multiple titles where the Rockets’ last one came just a few months before the Cowboys’. The only team that Dallas has “beat” in this capacity within the Lone Star State is the Houston Texans who were not even in operation until 2002 but do have more playoff wins than them in that time.

Again, some of this is simply poor luck that has broken against the Cowboys. It is also worth mentioning that the Spurs dynasty and golden era of Astros baseball have happened in the timeframe we are looking at and that by comparison they make the Cowboys look particularly bad.

But the Cowboys stand pretty all by themselves here. We are well past due for a chance.

Will we see one in 2024? Who knows.