Texas Wants to Know: How Did the Eagles Become the Cowboys' Biggest Rival?

The Dallas Cowboys host the Philadelphia Eagles on Saturday in one of the biggest rivalries in the NFL.

Texas Wants to Know teamed up with the hosts of the Philadelphia podcast, The Jawncast, to try to figure out how the tension between these two cities got so intense.

According to Philadelphia's 94WIP afternoon host Jon Marks, the city has hated Dallas for so many generations that he can't pinpoint when it started.

"I just remember at a very young age that you didn't like the Cowboys. They were the enemy," he said. "So my kids - right now, my daughter's 2 or 3 years old and knows 'E-A-G-L-E-S Eagles!' and you do not root for the Dallas Cowboys."

In Dallas, though, Bryan Broaddus of 105.3 The Fan said they didn't always see the Eagles as major competition.

"It used to be the Washington team way back in the day," Broaddus remembered. "Now the last, say, 20-25 years, it's clearly the Philadelphia Eagles."

Eagles fan antics have contributed a lot, too. Broaddus worked as a scout in the past for both the Cowboys and the Eagles at different times, and he remembers some intense games at Veterans Stadium.

"In 1999, it was my first year with the Cowboys," he recalled. "Michael Irvin, the star wide receiver for the Cowboys, gets hurt. He's laying on the ground [with a] neck injury. The Eagles fans are booing him laying on the ground and hurt, and you're going, 'Man, this is serious here'."

Marks acknowledged that Eagles fans have taken it too far sometimes, but he gets a good laugh out of some stories.

"There was one Cowboys game … where they had like a blow-up Cowboys doll," he said. "And there was this guy who used to bring a chainsaw … he's chainsawing this blow-up doll, and the chainsaw gets caught and it ends up clipping him. Like, literally, this is how worked up people get before these games."

Listen to Texas Wants to Know and The Jawncast compare Philadelphia and Dallas on the free Audacy app, or wherever you get your podcasts.