Pro Football Hall of Famer Gil Brandt, who helped turn Cowboys into 'America's Team,' dies at the age of 91

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Gil Brandt, overshadowed by coach Tom Landry and general manager Tex Schramm as part of the trio that built the Dallas Cowboys into "America’s Team" in the 1970s, has died. He was 91.

The Pro Football Hall of Fame said Brandt died Thursday morning. No cause of death was given, but Brandt had been in declining health in recent years.

Brandt was the player personnel director alongside the stoic, fedora-wearing Landry and media-savvy Schramm, but had to wait almost 30 years longer to get into the Hall of Fame.

By the time Brandt was enshrined as a contributor, it was as much for his ability to remain involved in the NFL by adapting to the social media age as for the innovation the Cowboys brought to the draft process with computers in the early 1960s.

"You can’t tell the story about the success of the Dallas Cowboys and their two-decade run of winning seasons from the mid-1960s to mid-1980s without mentioning Gil Brandt," Hall of Fame president Jim Porter said.

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"To me," said former Dallas running back Calvin Hill, a first-round pick in 1969, "Gil should have been the first one in terms of certainly from a personnel standpoint."

In 2019, Brandt finally joined Landry (1990) and Schramm (1991) in Canton, Ohio, and always said he never felt overshadowed.

"I think we all got credit," Brandt told The Associated Press before his induction. "And I think Tex rightfully so got more credit than Tom and myself. Because he was really a very media-savvy person. When somebody from Sports Illustrated called, they didn’t talk to Tom, they didn’t talk