Cowboys Legends: Aikman, Smith, Irvin

The Dallas Cowboys’ history is a collector’s dream. The 1990s dynasty alone gave the hobby three Hall of Famers in the “Triplets” — Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith, and Michael Irvin — and the franchise’s roots run back to Roger Staubach and Tony Dorsett, with later stars like Deion Sanders adding to the depth.

The Triplets

• Troy Aikman — the No. 1 overall pick in the 1989 draft out of UCLA. Rookie cards span 1989 Score, 1989 Pro Set, and the 1989 Topps Traded set (his Topps rookie lives in Traded, not the base set). Three-time champion (Super Bowl XXVII MVP, XXVIII, XXX); chase high-grade rookies.
• Emmitt Smith — drafted 17th overall in 1990 out of Florida. The NFL’s all-time rushing leader, a three-time champion, Super Bowl XXVIII MVP, and 1993 league MVP — a blue-chip vintage-adjacent name whose 1990 rookies span several major brands.
• Michael Irvin — “The Playmaker,” Dallas’s first-round pick in 1988 out of Miami; his widely collected rookie cards come from 1989 products. The Hall of Fame receiver of the trio and a three-time champion.

The broader legends

• Roger Staubach — “Captain America.” A Heisman winner at Navy who served before turning pro, he didn’t debut for Dallas until 1969 at age 27 — which is why his rookie card, 1972 Topps, arrives three years after his first NFL snap. Super Bowl MVP and two-time champion.
• Deion Sanders — “Prime Time.” His 1989 rookie cards (Atlanta Falcons debut season) are a different lane from his 1995–1999 Cowboys-era cards, when he won Super Bowl XXX in Dallas — collectors building a Cowboys collection specifically want the Dallas-uniform run, not the Falcons rookie.
• Tony Dorsett — the second overall pick of the 1977 draft out of Pitt. NFL Rookie of the Year and a Super Bowl XII champion in his very first season; his 1978 Topps rookie predates the junk-wax boom entirely, making it genuine 1970s vintage.

Beyond the household names

The Cowboys have twenty-one Hall of Famers, and this list covers only the most-searched few. The 1960s and 1970s enshrinees — Bob Lilly, Chuck Howley, Mel Renfro, Bob Hayes, Cliff Harris, Drew Pearson, Randy White, Rayfield Wright — plus modern greats Larry Allen and DeMarcus Ware are mapped year-by-year in our Dallas Cowboys Hall of Famers card reference, which also explains why mid-1960s Cowboys cards say Philadelphia, not Topps.

Condition is everything — but not for the same reason

This list spans two very different eras, and that changes what “buy graded” actually means for each name. Staubach (1972) and Dorsett (1978) are true vintage — printed years before the hobby’s overproduction era, so surviving high-grade copies are scarce in an absolute sense, not just relative to raw copies. Aikman, Emmitt, Irvin, and Deion all arrived in 1989–1990, right as Score and Pro Set broke Topps’ monopoly and print runs exploded — their raw rookies are common and cheap, so a graded gem-mint copy is valuable purely because survival in that condition is rare, not because the card itself is scarce. Either way, prefer authenticated, graded copies (PSA, SGC, BGS) for anything you’re buying to hold. The rails above open live listings so you can compare condition and recent sold prices.