Tex Schramm: The Man Who Built the Dallas Cowboys Beyond the Field

Before the Cowboys became America's Team, someone had to imagine what they could become.

There was a time when the Dallas Cowboys had no championships, no silver-and-blue mythology, no Thanksgiving tradition and no place among the most recognizable franchises in American sports.

There wasn't even much of a football team.

In 1960, Dallas entered the NFL as an expansion franchise and finished its first season 0-11-1. The Cowboys played in the Cotton Bowl, were trying to establish themselves in a city where professional football had already failed, and were years away from becoming anything resembling the organization fans recognize today.

Tom Landry had to build the football team.

Gil Brandt had to find the players.

And Tex Schramm had to imagine what the Dallas Cowboys could become.

That may have been the most unusual assignment of all.

Because Schramm wasn't merely building an NFL front office.

He was building an identity.

Starting With Almost Nothing

Cowboys owner Clint Murchison Jr. hired Schramm as the fledgling franchise's general manager before Dallas began play. Schramm, in turn, hired Landry as head coach and Brandt to oversee player personnel, creating the leadership trio that would guide the organization for nearly three decades.

The beginning offered little evidence of what was coming.

Dallas didn't post a .500 season until 1965.

Then everything changed.

Beginning in 1966, the Cowboys produced 20 consecutive winning seasons, an extraordinary run that included 18 playoff appearances, 13 division championships, five trips to the Super Bowl and victories in Super Bowls VI and XII.

Landry's teams became famous for preparation, precision and innovation.

Brandt's personnel department kept supplying players capable of operating Landry's increasingly sophisticated systems.

Schramm's responsibility was larger and harder to define.

He had to make the entire organization work.

And he understood something surprisingly early:

Winning could make the Cowboys successful. But winning alone would not make them important.

Building More Than a Football Team

Schramm had spent years in professional football before Dallas existed, including a decade with the Los Angeles Rams and three years working in sports television at CBS. He understood both sides of the business - the game being played and the audience watching it.

That combination mattered.

Schramm saw professional football not merely as competition but as presentation.

Traditions mattered. Television mattered. The stadium mattered. The way the organization presented itself mattered. Even the moments surrounding the football game mattered.

One of the clearest examples arrived in 1966.

Dallas volunteered to host an NFL game on Thanksgiving Day, establishing a tradition that eventually became inseparable from the Cowboys themselves.

Years later came another Schramm-era creation: the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, whose redesigned adult squad debuted in the early 1970s and quickly became a cultural phenomenon extending well beyond football.

In 1975, Schramm established the Dallas Cowboys Ring of Honor, giving the organization its own way of preserving the people responsible for building its history.

None of those things won a football game.

Together, however, they helped create something enormously valuable:

a recognizable Cowboys culture.

The Man Who Understood Television

Schramm's instinct for presentation wasn't accidental.

Before joining Dallas, he worked at CBS Sports and was involved in developing television coverage of the 1960 Winter Olympics. That experience reinforced his belief that technology and television could change the relationship between sports and the people watching them.

He carried that thinking into professional football.

Where others saw a game being played inside a stadium, Schramm increasingly saw a national television product.

That philosophy fit perfectly with the Cowboys' rise during the 1960s and 1970s.

Dallas was winning. Landry was distinctive. The uniforms were distinctive. The star was unmistakable. Texas Stadium, with its famous opening in the roof, became instantly recognizable. And the Cowboys seemed to appear on television when the stakes were highest.

By the late 1970s, the transformation was essentially complete.

The expansion franchise that once couldn't win a game had become known nationally as America's Team.

Schramm didn't personally invent every ingredient that produced that identity. But perhaps more than anyone else in the organization, he understood how all the ingredients could become something larger than themselves.

Schramm, Landry and Brandt

The original Cowboys organization worked because its three principal architects possessed remarkably different strengths.

Landry was the football intellectual.

Brandt was the talent evaluator.

Schramm was the organizational visionary.

There was overlap, disagreement and undoubtedly friction, but the division of responsibility was unusually effective.

A particularly revealing example involved computers.

After becoming fascinated by emerging computer technology, Schramm challenged Brandt to explore whether computers could help Dallas evaluate football prospects. That assignment became part of the Cowboys' pioneering use of computerized information in player scouting.

That episode says something important about Schramm.

He didn't necessarily need to know exactly how a new idea would work.

He needed to recognize that it might work - and then put the right person in position to find out.

The Cowboys eventually developed one of football's most sophisticated scouting operations, searching small colleges and unconventional sources for players other organizations might overlook.

It was another example of a philosophy that seemed to run throughout Schramm's career:

If everybody else was doing something one way, Dallas should at least ask whether there was a better way.

Changing the NFL Along With the Cowboys

Schramm's influence eventually became too large to remain contained within one franchise.

For 23 years, he chaired the NFL's powerful Competition Committee. He advocated numerous changes that became familiar parts of professional football, including referee microphones, instant replay, changes to the play clock and the development of the wild-card playoff system.

His biggest contribution to the league may have been political rather than technological.

During the 1960s, the established NFL and rival American Football League were engaged in an increasingly expensive battle for players and markets.

Schramm and Kansas City Chiefs founder Lamar Hunt became central figures in secret negotiations that helped produce the AFL-NFL merger, announced in 1966 and fully implemented in 1970.

Think about the scale of that legacy.

The same executive helping build a new football franchise in Dallas was simultaneously helping shape the structure of the league the Cowboys would eventually dominate.

Schramm wasn't simply thinking about Sunday's game.

He was thinking about what professional football might look like years later.

When the First Era Ended

Nothing lasts forever, even when it once seemed as though it might.

The Cowboys' remarkable streak of winning seasons ended after 1985.

By the late 1980s, the franchise that had represented stability for nearly three decades was struggling.

Then came 1989.

Jerry Jones purchased the Cowboys from Bum Bright. Tom Landry was dismissed. Jimmy Johnson arrived. Gil Brandt's tenure ended.

And Schramm's Cowboys era was over.

It was an abrupt conclusion to one of the longest and most consequential executive runs in NFL history.

Schramm subsequently became president and CEO of the World League of American Football, but his defining work had already been completed. In 1991, he was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, becoming the first person whose primary Cowboys role was neither player nor coach to receive football's highest institutional honor.

He died in 2003 at age 83.

By then, the organization he had helped create had long since become something even Schramm might have struggled to imagine in 1960.

The Franchise He Left Behind

There is a temptation when discussing executives to measure their careers in transactions, championships and organizational charts.

Those things matter.

Schramm's Cowboys reached five Super Bowls and won two. They produced 20 consecutive winning seasons and became one of the dominant franchises of their era.

But his larger achievement is visible in things Cowboys fans barely think about anymore because they have become so familiar.

Thanksgiving afternoon.

The Ring of Honor.

The spectacle surrounding the team.

The expectation that Dallas should be nationally relevant.

The idea that the Cowboys aren't simply a football team but an institution with its own history, traditions and identity.

Those things didn't appear automatically when the NFL awarded Dallas a franchise.

They were built.

And Tex Schramm spent nearly three decades helping build them.

Legacy Reflection

Tom Landry gave the Cowboys their football identity.

Gil Brandt helped find the players who could bring that identity to life.

The players supplied the victories, championships and moments generations of fans still remember.

But Tex Schramm understood something just as important.

A great franchise needed more than great Sundays.

It needed traditions. It needed symbols. It needed history. It needed an identity strong enough to survive the people who originally created it.

Schramm didn't simply help build a winning football team.

He helped build what the Dallas Cowboys meant.

By Jesse Worrell

Founder & Editor, The Doomsday Legacy