Dallas Vigilantes
arena football team
The Dallas Vigilantes were an Arena Football League (AFL) team based in Dallas, Texas. Like its AFL predecessor, the Dallas Desperados, the Vigilantes played at the American Airlines Center. The Vigilantes and the Jacksonville Sharks began play in the 2010 season, the first after the league's restructuring. The franchise was owned by former Tampa Bay Storm owner Peter C. Kern and was managed by Stephen Evans. Vigilantes games were broadcast on the radio on 1190 AM and television coverage was provided by Time Warner Cable Sports.
History
The Vigilantes did not carry on the name of Dallas' previous AFL team, the Dallas Desperados, because of a unique ownership situation with the former team. Although the new AFL owns the former AFL team assets (hence the Arizona Rattlers, Chicago Rush, Cleveland Gladiators, Orlando Predators, Tampa Bay Storm, and Utah Blaze names going over to the new AF1), former Desperados owner Jerry Jones (who also owns the NFL's Dallas Cowboys) retained the team's branding rights after it folded. Jones had based most of the Desperados branding on that of the Cowboys, including the colors, prominent use of a star in the logo, and a Cowboys "Double Star" logo on the front of the Desperados' jerseys, thus making the Cowboys and Desperados branding very difficult to separate. Not willing to risk such complicated legal action, and apparently unwilling to revive the Fort Worth Cavalry (another former AFL team that played in the region that coincidentally was owned by Kern), the Vigilantes chose a new name. The Vigilantes' original logo incorporated a skull and crossbones, the flag of Texas, a cowboy hat, and revolvers.
“Dallas Vigilantes” enters the record as arena football team. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Dallas, Vigilantes and arena can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5211444. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2010 and 1190.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dallas Vigilantes” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.