However, by the mid-1960s, founding owner Clint Murchison, Jr., felt that the Fair Park area of the city had become unsafe and downtrodden, and did not want his season ticket holders to be forced to go through it.

[8] Murchison was denied a request by mayor Erik Jonsson to build a new stadium in downtown Dallas as part of a municipal bond package.

[9] Murchison envisioned a new stadium with sky boxes and one in which attendees would have to pay a personal seat license as a prerequisite to purchasing season tickets.

More so than its contemporaries, Texas Stadium featured a proliferation of luxury boxes, which provided the team with a large new income source exempt from league revenue sharing.

The Cowboys entered the season as defending NFC champions and won their first world title in Super Bowl VI in January 1972.

Cowboys linebacker D. D. Lewis once famously said that "Texas Stadium has a hole in its roof, so God can watch His favorite team play".

The unusual roof also introduced a unique difficulty in televising games, as sunlight would cover part of the field and make it hard for TV cameras to adjust for the changes in light.

[13] The stadium hosted numerous neutral-site college football games and was the home field of the SMU Mustangs for eight seasons, from 1979 through 1986.

[citation needed] The stadium has also played host to the two largest capacity crowds for Texas high school football playoff games.

[14] In 1988, Texas Stadium hosted the Class 5A championship game, where Dallas Carter, led by future New York Giants Pro Bowl linebacker Jessie Armstead, defeated Converse Judson 31-14.

Carter advanced to the final by defeating Odessa Permian 14-9 in the semifinals at Memorial Stadium in Austin in a game highlighted by the book Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream and its film adaptation.

In 1994, the stadium hosted the John Tyler vs. Plano East high school football regional playoff, whose wild seesaw finish won it the 1995 Showstopper of the Year ESPY Award.

The Band Jesse Colin Young 5ive The stadium appeared in numerous episodes of the television series, Walker, Texas Ranger (1993–2001), which was filmed in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex.

The stadium has also appeared in the season one finale of Friday Night Lights As a setting for the State Championship game between the Dillon Panthers and the West Cambria Mustangs.

An overhead shot of the stadium (looking down at the field from the hole in the roof) was also featured prominently as part of the show's opening credits for each of its thirteen seasons on CBS.

The City of Irving announced that the Texas Department of Transportation would pay $15.4 million to lease the site for 10 years for use as a staging location for the State Highway 114/Loop 12 diamond interchange.