The Team Of The '90s?

It's one of those things that have been clearly defined for the last 50 years of pro football: Team of the Decade. The Chicago Bears in the 1940s, the Cleveland Browns in the '50s, the Green Bay Packers in the '60s, the Pittsburgh Steelers in the '70s, the San Francisco 49ers in the '80s—five teams that rose up and grabbed a 10-year chunk of history by the throat. And now, three ticks into the '90s, it's time to make a call: Which team will define this decade?

The New York Giants and the Washington Redskins each have a leg up with one Super Bowl victory, but somehow we just can't see either of them dominating this 10-year span. The Giants are an aging team, in the down cycle. The Skins? Consistently good, as they were in the '80s, but also showing some age. The Buffalo Bills? The Niners again? The Detroit Lions? Uh-uh.

The team of the '90s will be the Dallas Cowboys. Yes, those same Cowboys who were scorned three years ago when a pair of JJs—owner Jerry Jones and coach Jimmy Johnson—arrived to plot the team's destiny and then christened the new era with a 1-15 record. The same Cowboys who saw their mighty empire sink into the mire of five straight losing seasons before they finally reached the playoffs last year. Those Cowboys.

The main reason we like them is a basic one: youth—the fire of youth, young legs in December and January, when the long season has taken its toll and the injuries are mounting. The 16-game NFL regular season has turned the game into an endurance contest.

"I didn't really have a timetable when I got here in 1989," Johnson says, "but I had a commitment to use every avenue to upgrade the talent, even if it meant sacrificing a win or two. The draft, Plan B, waivers, trades—I was going to search all the ways until I found the right players to suit our style. We traded Herschel Walker, our only Pro Bowl player for the two previous seasons, for three years' worth of high draft picks. Ray Alexander had been the team's leading receiver the year before, but we released him to look at younger players. The media made jokes about all the changes our first couple of years. There was no continuity, because I kept a revolving door with players: claim some off waivers, cut three or four the next day, claim three or four a day later. If we were concerned about respectability that first year, we would have kept Walker, kept Alexander and tried to win two or three extra games. But that wasn't going to get us to the Super Bowl."

The memory of that 1-15 first season is a nightmare for Johnson, the same kind of thing Chuck Noll lived through in his rookie year (1-13), before Pittsburgh made its move; the same thing Bill Walsh experienced in his first season (2-14), before the Niners got good.

"We couldn't play with anybody," says free safety Ray Horton, 32, one of the few players who have been around for the entire Jones-Johnson era, "and we probably couldn't coach with anybody. But the coaches adjusted. They learned the pro game."

Before the 1940 season George Halas looked at his Chicago Bear team, and he saw creeping old age. So he infused the squad with new blood, starting the season with 11 rookies and eight second-year players on his 33-man roster. The average age of his team was 25 years; average experience was 3.1 seasons. It was one of the youngest teams ever to win an NFL championship, which the Bears did most resoundingly—73-0 over the Redskins—even with four rookies in the starting lineup. Gone were 20 players from the 1937 team, the last Chicago team that had played in the title game. Halas's young Bears went on to win four championships in the '40s.

In the 1950s Detroit won as many titles as Cleveland did (three), but the Browns were in the title game another four times to the Lions' one, which gives them the nod. The Browns were a maturing team when they made their NFL debut in 1950, seasoned by four years of dominance in the old All-America Football Conference. But when Paul Brown was putting together his first AAFC club, in 1946, he grabbed 25 players with no professional experience—collegians he had coached at Ohio State and guys he remembered from his service days at Great Lakes Naval Training Station. Brown knew what he was doing, and that bunch formed the nucleus of a 15-year powerhouse.

Vince Lombardi's formula in Green Bay was different. He inherited a 1-10 team that had been disorganized under predecessor Scooter McLean but was heavy in young talent. Seven members of that team eventually made the Hall of Fame. It was up to Lombardi to get them going in the right direction. The Packers had a winning season in Lombardi's first year (1959), a championship loss to the Philadelphia Eagles a year later and then, a year after that, the first of their five titles in the '60s.