Gil Brandt, 91, Dies; Helped Make the Cowboys ‘America’s Team’

Gil Brandt, who in almost 30 years as a scout and expertise evaluator helped construct the Dallas Cowboys right into a National Football League powerhouse, died on Thursday in Dallas. He was 91.

His dying, in hospice care, was introduced by the Pro Football Hall of Fame, to which he was inducted in 2019.

Mr. Brandt joined the Cowboys in 1960, earlier than their first season, and labored beside Tom Landry, the taciturn head coach, and Tex Schramm, the progressive president and normal supervisor, to make them a perennial winner and a two-time Super Bowl champion. In time, the Cowboys grew to become often known as “America’s Team.”

As the crew’s vp of participant personnel, Mr. Brandt was recognized for increasing his scouting past major-conference colleges. He drafted future stars just like the large receiver Bob Hayes, the defensive deal with Jethro Pugh, the offensive lineman Rayfield Wright and the linebacker Thomas (Hollywood) Henderson, who all performed at traditionally Black faculties and universities.

Mr. Hayes, Mr. Wright, and the quarterbacks Roger Staubach and Troy Aikman are among the many 9 gamers whose drafting Mr. Brandt oversaw who have been later elected to the Hall of Fame.

But it was not solely the place Mr. Brandt and the Cowboys’ scouts found expertise that separated Dallas from different groups. It was additionally the usage of psychological checks to evaluate potential draft picks’ characters. In addition, his contribution to fashionable expertise appraisal rested on the crew’s forward-thinking use of know-how.

At Mr. Schramm’s suggestion, Mr. Brandt started utilizing a large IBM laptop in 1962 to meticulously consider prospects. He assigned numerical values to many character traits, together with character and competitiveness, and to many bodily qualities like quickness and power; saved them on punch playing cards; and loaded them into the pc.

The consequence was a database that enabled the Cowboys to sift via info shortly and comprehensively, weigh the abilities of prospects and make suggestions to Mr. Landry and Mr. Schramm. This gave the crew a aggressive edge.

The Cowboys’ popularity for utilizing a pc grew to become recognized shortly.

During the 1964 school draft, held within the ballroom of a Chicago lodge, the Cowboys have been stalling on making their second choose. Vince Lombardi, the Green Bay Packers’ coach, scolded Mr. Brandt and his fellow Dallas executives.

In varied interviews, Mr. Brandt recalled Mr. Lombardi asking him: “What happened? Did your computer break down?”

It had not. The Cowboys had despatched a physician to judge Mel Renfro, a cornerback from the University of Oregon. Once glad that he was wholesome, they chose Mr. Renfro, who would change into a five-time All-Pro and be inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1996.

“It starts with the computer,” Mr. Brandt mentioned earlier than his Hall of Fame induction. “No one will ever know how many hours we spent with that. And that was really the thing that set us apart from everybody.”

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, additionally earlier than his induction, he mentioned: “They talk about analytics now. We did the same thing 50 years ago. Except we called it probabilities.”

Gilbert Harvey Brandt was born on March 4, 1932, in Milwaukee. His father, additionally named Gilbert, was district supervisor for National Food Stores. His mom, Loretta, was a homemaker.

Gil performed defensive again and operating again in highschool. He attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison however left after two years and moved again along with his dad and mom.

He took a job offering nurses at native hospitals with cameras that they’d use to {photograph} infants. He would then develop and distribute the images. It was not a path to a soccer profession; he started that profession because of a household pal.

That pal was Elroy Hirsch, who had been often known as Crazy Legs when he was a Los Angeles Rams receiver, and who owned an area enterprise. He really helpful that Mr. Schramm, then the Rams’ normal supervisor, rent Mr. Brandt as a part-time scout within the Midwest.

“I had a lot of time and they were looking for somebody for $50 a weekend or something like that,” Mr. Brandt informed The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2009. “In the spring I’d go see Marquette, Wisconsin, Northwestern. In those days, I don’t know if anybody knew a lot about it. If on a scale of what they do today is a 100, we were probably minus 10.”

Mr. Schramm had already left the Rams to change into assistant director of sports activities at CBS, however in 1959 he joined the growth Cowboys and requested Mr. Brandt to come back alongside. Mr. Landry, then defensive coach of the New York Giants, quickly joined them.

“The great thing that happened to me is we went to a place with an owner that had money” — the oilman Clint Murchison Jr. — “a G.M., Tex, who believed in scouting; and Tom was one of the greatest people of all time,” Mr. Brandt informed The Journal Sentinel. “We had more gimmicks than anybody in the world. It was easy. It was so less competitive then.”

By the late Eighties, nevertheless, the Cowboys’ success was waning. In 1989, after Jerry Jones purchased the crew, he fired Mr. Landry and Mr. Brandt. Mr. Schramm resigned.

Mr. Brandt quickly reinvented himself — first within the mid-Nineties as a senior analyst on the N.F.L.’s web site, writing concerning the draft, free company and different topics, and a decade later as a bunch on Sirius (later SiriusXM) satellite tv for pc radio. He continued to make participant evaluations on NFL.com prematurely of every 12 months’s draft.

But in 2022, he needed to apologize for remarks that he had made on SiriusXM after the dying of Dwayne Haskins, a 24-year-old reserve Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback, who was hit by a dump truck whereas crossing a freeway in Florida. Mr. Brandt implied that Mr. Haskins would have been alive had he not left Ohio State early.

“I reacted carelessly and insensitively on a radio interview,” Mr. Brandt wrote on Twitter. “I want to apologize to Mr. Haskins’s family and anyone who heard my poor choice of words.”

In addition to his spouse, Sara (Paullus) Brandt, Mr. Brandt is survived by two sons, Hunter and Brig.

The unhealthy emotions between Mr. Brandt and Mr. Jones didn’t final lengthy. They ultimately grew to become buddies, and Mr. Jones added Mr. Brandt to the Cowboys’ Ring of Honor in 2018. The subsequent 12 months, Mr. Brandt requested Mr. Jones to be his presenter at his Hall of Fame induction.

“As you know, Jerry and I have come a long way since our first three months of working together,” he mentioned in his speech. And he thanked Mr. Jones “for making me a free agent 30 years ago.”