Cowboys showcase girls flag combine as college offers surge

More than 30 athletes landed college offers at the 2026 Girls Flag Football College Combine presented by Bridgestone, held at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. The Dallas Cowboys put the event front and center as a clear sign that girls flag football is no longer just growing, it is producing real recruiting traffic.

That growth is happening at full speed. The NFL says more than 35 states are now offering or piloting sanctioned girls high school flag football programs, while more than 100 colleges and universities had women’s flag football across the NCAA, NAIA and NJCAA in spring 2025. With flag football set to make its Olympic debut at the LA28 Games, the sport is building a ladder that now reaches from high school fields to college rosters.

The Cowboys have been laying that groundwork in Texas for years. They hosted a girls flag football college combine at AT&T Stadium on June 29, 2025, after staging a Bridgestone Girls Flag Football Combine in 2024 at the same venue. In 2025, the club expanded its youth football development push by launching regional high school girls flag football leagues, then joined with the Houston Texans in 2026 to announce the first-ever Girls Flag Texas State Championship.

The pipeline is not being built by Texas alone. In December 2025, the Betty Wold Johnson Foundation gave the ECAC a $1 million grant to launch what it called the nation’s largest collegiate women’s flag football league, set to begin in spring 2026. That kind of funding, paired with the new state-by-state growth, is turning women’s flag football from a promising add-on into a structured recruiting market.

Bridgestone has treated the sport the same way, linking its girls flag football work with Play Like a Girl! and five NFL teams, including the Cowboys, as part of a broader sports and STEM push for young women. The company’s message has been about access and opportunity; the combine in Arlington showed the football side of that promise, with college offers arriving in real time.

The numbers tell the story better than any marketing line. More than 20 million people in more than 100 countries play flag football, and the talent pipeline is now deep enough that a single combine in Texas can turn exposure into scholarships and offers.