Sorry, Dallas, no "Stone Cold" Steve Austin for you next year.
Despite a strong online push and interest by both the Dallas Cowboys and World Wrestling Entertainment, the two parties will not be able to come to an agreement to bring the showcase wrestling event to Arlington in the next two years due to conflicts with the NCAA Men's basketball tournament.
"We can't host WrestleMania the next two years because of NCAA Regional in '13 and Final Four in '14," Dallas Cowboys spokesman Brett Daniels told The Dallas Observer. "We've talked with them and gave it a shot but couldn't make the schedule work."
Over the past several years, the WWE has held their biggest event of the year in large, outdoor football stadiums. Starting in 2007, the event was held at Ford Field in Detroit, followed by Orlando's Citrus Bowl, Houston's Reliant Stadium, Phoenix's University of Phoenix Stadium and last year at the Georgia Dome.
Sun Life Stadium will host Wrestlemania 28 on April 1 in Miami. The main event will feature a match between John Cena and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. Johnson was a defensive tackle for the Miami Hurricanes and was a member of their 1991 national championship team.
During a television taping in Dallas on Oct. 13, WWE's Executive Vice President of Talent, Paul "Triple H" Levesque, led a sold-out crowd at the American Airlines Center in a chant of "We want Wrestlemania," and the scene was captured by camera's and posted to the company's website.
When Jerry Jones was building Cowboys Stadium, he expressed his desire to bring more events than football games to the place many have labeled "Jerry World."
The NCAA Men's Final Four in 2014 will join a list of events at the stadium that already includes sold-out concerts from the likes of U2, Paul McCartney and George Strait to the 2010 NBA All-Star Game (and the record-breaking crowd of 108,713 that attended), two Manny Pacquiao fights and Super Bowl XLV.
