A Big Mess in Texas: The Miraculous, Disastrous 1952 Dallas Texans and the Craziest Untold Story in NFL History

Summary

THE INCREDIBLE, UNTOLD TRUE STORY OF THE 1952 DALLAS TEXANS—THE MOST DYSFUNCTIONAL TEAM IN THE CRAZIEST SEASON IN NFL HISTORY

Rattlesnakes on the practice field, barroom brawls between teammates, bounced checks, paternity suits, house bombings by the Ku Klux Klan, stadium fields covered in circus-elephant dung, one-legged trainers, humiliating defeats, miraculous wins, All-Pro quarterbacks getting drunk at halftime, strip poker with groupies, and even a future Hall of Fame coach stealing a cab.

Nearly lost to history, this singular season in the most football-mad region of the world is a kaleidoscope of every larger-than-life, fictionalized Texas football folktale ever written or filmed, with one incredible twist: it’s all true. Over a fascinating, ten-month roller-coaster ride in 1952, in the waning Wild West days of the NFL, before television turned the game into a corporation, the forgotten Dallas Texans would go down in history as one of the worst (and wildest) teams of all time and the last NFL team to fail. But not before defying the Jim Crow South, pulling off a Thanksgiving Day miracle against George Halas’s famed Chicago Bears, and then celebrating with an even-more-infamous bender that would make Jimmy Johnson’s Dallas Cowboys blush. A year later, the NFL buried all traces of the most lovable, dysfunctional, entertaining team in history by secretly rebranding the train-wreck Texans as the wholesome, all-American Baltimore Colts, the team that would go on to save pro football.

A Big Mess in Texas tells the Texans’ tale with all the humor, drama, game action, colorful characters, villains, world-class athletes, civil rights trailblazers, and incredible plot twists of that legendary season.

“No writer captures the glorious absurdity of sports quite like David Fleming, so it’s almost not fair for him to write about the most absurd team in NFL history. Reading Fleming on the 1952 Dallas Texans will MAKE YOU APPRECIATE that even Jerry Jones can’t hold a candle to the chaos of football yesteryear.”—Joe Posnanski, #1 New York Times bestselling author

This audiobook includes an exclusive conversation between the author and singer-songwriter Rhett Miller (the Old 97’s, Wheels Off podcast).