The chairman and CEO of the Kansas City Chiefs has revealed that the Dallas Cowboys were formed with his father and legendary entrepreneur in the sports industry, the late Lamar Hunt, as the reason for the Cowboys' birth.

Hunt appeared as a guest on the Intersections Podcast with Tom Leppert and Kyle Waldrep back in December 2025, where he discussed how Lamar created the American Football League, which led the NFL to bring in the Cowboys.

"So during this process when my dad was trying to organize the American Football League, the NFL at first acted like they didn't care and they largely took that stance because they were under antitrust scrutiny from Congress."

Lamar created the AFL in 1959 after the NFL rejected his idea of owning a franchise in Dallas, saying it wasn't ready to expand and that Dallas was a horrible market for football. This prompted the AFL's formation and Lamar's creation of the Dallas Texans franchise.

"The NFL, after thinking about it some more over the coming months, decided that maybe a new league that they'd have to compete with wasn't such a great idea," Hunt continued on the Intersections Podcast on YouTube. "And so that's how the Dallas Cowboys were created."

Hunt said the NFL created the Cowboys to compete with the Texans and ultimately forced Lamar to move his team to Kansas City in 1963.

But Hunt didn't stop there; he went on to discuss the biggest merger in pro football history.

Clark Hunt discusses the historic merger between the AFL and the NFL

Hunt certainly did not stop there, further discussing the vital merger between the two leagues. This happened after the heat between the two kept escalating, with two separate drafts, which created a problem for the leagues.

"There was a big battle to see who could be signed," Hunt said in the same interview. "And that just caused salaries to escalate. So by the time we get to the mid-1960s, the NFL decides, 'We've got to make peace, and we've got to figure out how to merge these two leagues.'"

The two leagues finally announced their merger on June 8, 1966, with the unified schedule taking place from 1970. The first-ever Super Bowl Game took place on January 15, 1967, with the Green Bay Packers winning 35-10 against Lamar's Kansas City.

So this is how the Cowboys came into existence, with the Chiefs' owning Hunt family having a rich history with the formation of the team.

Follow Dallas Cowboys Community for more.

Written by

Dhruv Singh

Edited by

Zaid Quraishi