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Tom Landry
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There are two ways to build a football team: Fit your system to the ability of the
players or get players to fit your system.
Tom Landry chose the second method and, for a time, that seemed very foolish. Coaching
the expansion Cowboys, Landry had an 0-11-1 record in his first season, and it wasn’t
until his sixth season that he got his team to .500. But once he found the players, he
coached the Cowboys to 20 straight winning seasons, an NFL record.
Maybe he had the right idea after all.
Actually, the choice wasn’t as difficult as it would be today for Landry, who died
Feb. 12 at age 75. Then and now, established teams are loath to give expansion teams good
players, but in this era, an expansion team can wait a year and, with all the room it has
under the salary cap, sign free agents to immediately strengthen itself.
In 1960, when Landry and the Cowboys started, there was no such thing as free agency. A
team had to build through the draft. It would have been a waste of time for Landry to
adapt his system to the players he had at the beginning because they were the dregs and,
equally important, wouldn’t be around by the time the team improved enough to be a
contender.
So while Landry was waiting for Gil Brandt to get players through the draft, Landry put
in his system on both sides of the ball.
Offensively, he put in the kind of system that had most bothered him as defensive
coordinator for the Giants, one with a lot of motion and formation shifts. The plays the
Cowboys ran weren’t really any different from what other teams were running, but they
seemed different because of all the movement. By his third season, even though the Cowboys
were just 5-8-1, Landry had put together a good offense; the team scored 393 points, an
average of 28.1 per game.
But the defense was really Landry’s baby. He had been a defensive halfback, a
position now labeled cornerback, and he had been the defensive coordinator in New York
while Vince Lombardi was the offensive coordinator.
Landry was just starting to put together the pieces of his defensive system, which
became known as the "flex" in Dallas. The underlying philosophy of the flex was
that every player had a specific responsibility on every play. It required great
discipline, and it was only as good as its weakest link.
Landry’s early defenses were weak, giving up as many as 402 points in a 14-game
season. But when he finally got the players he needed, the flex was a system that
frustrated many good offenses because of its discipline. Teams that relied on deception
— whether it was misdirection, screens, draws or gadget plays — found that the
Dallas defenders were never out of position.
However, while Landry was gaining a reputation as a coaching genius, he and his Cowboys
became the symbol of arrogance, a reputation that was enhanced when Cowboys management
(Tex Schramm, mostly) decided, without consulting the rest of the country, that they were
"America’s Team." (Amazingly, that designation still exists on the back of
the Cowboys’ media guide, though the original management team is long gone.)
Landry’s image was forever sealed by the book and movie "North Dallas
Forty," a transparent work of fiction modeled on the Cowboys’ operation by Pete
Gent, who had played with the Cowboys before turning to writing. The cold, heartless coach
in the movie was Gent’s vision of Landry.
It was a harsh view because Gent was embittered by his experience with the Cowboys,
though it was close to the truth. It was always difficult to reconcile the pious Landry,
who was so involved with his church, and the coach who seemed to care little for his
players.
But that was the style of the time. Landry was a conspicuous target because of his
success, but he wasn’t much different from most of the coaches of that era. Coaches
had all the authority in those days, and they wielded it. Any player who challenged a
coach was on the waiver wire the same day.
Lombardi was an emotional man, which made him seem more human than Landry. But Henry
Jordan wasn’t kidding when he said of Lombardi, "He treats us all the same
— like dogs."
If Lombardi had coached longer, he would have had to change his style to continue his
success. We’ll never know if he could have because he died of cancer several years
before the game began to change.
Landry continued to coach, and the changing times eventually caught up to him.
His relationship with his star quarterback, Roger Staubach, was one indication of that.
Staubach was an unlikely rebel, a product of the Naval Academy and as straight as an
arrow. But he rebelled against Landry’s tight control of the offense. Staubach
started going with his own instincts, calling audibles when he didn’t like the play
called on the sideline. He knew he was risking an icy stare from Landry if the play
didn’t work, but more often than not Staubach made it work because of his individual
brilliance.
In the early ’80s, 49ers head coach Bill Walsh exposed the famed flex defense,
showing how its rigidity could be exploited. Walsh could dictate how the Cowboys would
line up on defense just by the plays he called, and he made certain he achieved matchups
— RB Roger Craig being defended by a slower linebacker on passing plays, for instance
— that were advantageous for his team.
The 49ers humiliated the Cowboys 45-14 during the ’81 regular season and then beat
them 28-27 in that season’s NFC championship game. A bitter Landry did not take the
defeat graciously, saying the 49ers had won "with mirrors."
Though the Cowboys would have four more winning seasons, Landry was losing control.
Eventually, the Cowboys crashed to 3-13 in ’88, and Landry was fired by the new
owner, Jerry Jones.
But Landry deserves to be judged by his best, not his worst, and his best was very
good, indeed. With Lombardi and Don Shula, Landry was the best of his era. If his
inflexibility eventually brought him down, it also sustained him during that very rocky
early period.
Without Landry’s willingness to stay the course in the early ’60s, the legend
of the Cowboys would probably never have gotten off the ground.
Editor's note: Glenn Dickey is a columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle and has
covered pro football since 1967. He can be reached via e-mail at dickey@sfgate.com. |
