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

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 rollercoaster 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 loveable, 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.

DAVID FLEMING is a senior writer at ESPN. During the last three decades at Sports Illustrated, ESPN The Magazine and ESPN he has been one of the industry’s most prolific, versatile, and imaginative longform writers. Fleming’s unique work has earned numerous national awards. He is also the author of Breaker Boys: The NFL’s Greatest Team and the Stolen 1925 Championship, Noah’s Rainbow: A Father’s Emotional Journey from the Death of his Son to the Birth of his Daughter, and Who’s Your Founding Father?: One Man’s Epic Quest to Uncover the First, True Declaration of Independence. A native of Detroit, Fleming and his wife, Kim, live in North Carolina with their daughters.