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Return To The Top: 1992 Dallas Cowboys & Alabama Football

1992 was a year where there’s no clear-cut city that had a dominant year in sports. Pittsburgh certainly makes a good case for itself. Mario Lemieux led the Penguins to the Stanley Cup. Jim Leyland and Barry Bonds took the Pirates into the National League Championship Series for the second year in a row. And first-year head coach Bill Cowher put the Steelers back on the map as the top seed in the AFC playoffs before flaming out against Buffalo.

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The great city of Pittsburgh would indeed make a good choice. But we can do better, with just a little geographic creativity.
Let’s go down south into SEC country, in the state of Alabama. The Crimson Tide won their first national championship in 13 years, as Gene Stallings produced the program’s first crown since Bear Bryant retired.
Now, who would be the NFL choice here in this state that has no professional sports? You might say New Orleans, or you might jump over the Gulf of Mexico into Florida and say Tampa Bay or even Miami.
All are possible. But given the history of those franchises, and the fact that one more tradition-rich is also in the south, isn’t it reasonable to speculate that a large chunk of the Alabama fan base roots for the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday? I won’t cop to being an expert—I’ve never even been in Alabama, much less have my finger on the state’s professional sports pulse, but it seems like reasonable conjecture.
And those Dallas Cowboys also won a championship in 1992, and did it with a similar storyline to Alabama football. The Cowboys had not won a Super Bowl without Tom Landry, it had been 1977 since they won a championship, 1978 since they played for one and 1982 since they even reached the NFC Championship Game. That’s the same timeframe (within a year) that it been for Alabama, and ’82 was Bryant’s last year.
The Dallas Cowboys and Alabama football each returned to the top in 1992 and made it an extra special year for that element of the Crimson Tide fan base that puts on a Cowboy hat come Sunday afternoon.
Read more about the 1992 Dallas Cowboys
Read more about 1992 Alabama football

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