Who Would Win If the Dallas Cowboys Dynasty of the 90s faced the Colts Big Three of the 2000s in the Super Bowl?

Dallas without question.

That Colts team was built by GM Bill Polian who was responsible for putting together those very same Buffalo Bills teams that Dallas stomped all over in their back to back SB wins.

It must be noted that the Colts back in the day were never world beaters except on paper. Their playoff record speaks for itself. That team had one of the greatest quarterbacks in history and a juggernaut offense but had an average defense and were very beatable in the playoffs. All those early playoff exits say it all for the Colts. They should've become a dynasty and the Patriots are not to blame. The Chargers embarrassed them far worse than the Pats ever did and far more often. Both times the Colts reached the SB, they did not have to play the Chargers. This has to be stressed cause it was the Chargers who were their biggest issue, not the Pats.

Indy had a similar weakness to those old Buffalo teams that Polian built. Where the Bills had a mediocre secondary that was exploitable with elite wide receivers and QB's, the Colts problem was their run defense. Their 2006 team had the league worst rushing defense when they won the SB. Luckily in that playoff run, they didn't have to face any teams who had elite RBs that could've exploited them like how Pittsburgh did with Jerome Bettis in the 2005 playoff. They completely avoided the one team that probably would've thrashed them (Chargers) and definitely had the run game to do it.

If you go through all of the Colts playoff losses in those years, you'll see it was mostly against teams that gashed them on the run and could tear their defense up. They used to get owned by the Chargers who would utilize LD Tomlinson and Darren Sproles on them. We even did this to them to a degree in the SB with using Pierre Thomas on screens. The Steelers got on them with Jerome Bettis in the 2005 playoff game, etc etc. To beat the Colts back in the day, you had to run the ball on them and work a gameplan around shifting RBs to beat them.

Safe to say that Emmitt Smith would have a field day on their defense. The Colts were running the Tampa-2 scheme which is exploitable if a team knows how to approach them correctly. It's most likely that the Cowboys would use TE Jay Novacek to create big problems over the middle of the field. Novacek is probably the most underrated single player of those Cowboys teams. He was an elite TE in his day and one of Aikman's favorite targets. Watch some of their old games and they used to create match up problems with Novacek over middle routes.

The Cowboys dynasty defense is slightly underrated and overlooked by fans outside of stat nerds. Their 1992 team had a top 5 ranked defense that had no pro bowlers. Most of the talk is about the triplets on offense (Aikman, Smith and Irvin) but on defense, they had a pretty solid defensive line that had Charles Haley, Jim Jeffcoat and Tony Tolbert. Add in Ken Norton at LB, and they most likely end up getting pressure on Manning. Their secondary with Kevin Smith, Darren Woodson and Thomas Everett would give teams serious fits. Probably the most overlooked thing about those Dallas teams is how good their secondaries were. Go back to their NFC title games vs the 49ers and they shut Jerry Rice down in those games. They would let Steve Young gets his yards but they'd shut down Rice and limit them without their deep threat option. They did the same thing when they played Buffalo in those SB's (locking up Andre Reed and not allowing him to burn them). I don't doubt for a minute they'd find a way to lock down Marvin Harrison from going off on them.