Tom Landry

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“People Who Call Themselves America’s Team Are Talking More About Reaching The Alpha State Than The End Zone”

October 20, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

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In Julie Turkewitz’s bright New York Times article about the renaissance of sensory deprivation tanks, she mentions that it was a training method at one point of the Dallas Cowboys, a football team led from 1960 by a control-freak head coach in Tom Landry, who favored bleeding-edge technological, computer and neuropsychological systems (see here and here). Excerpts follow from two articles about the Cowboys utilization of tech and tanks.

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From Malcolm Moran’s 1981 New York Times’ article “Cowboys Floating into the 80’s“:

DALLAS— The clear plastic mats lead out of the locker room, past the blue and silver banner that says Cowboys, and into a smaller meeting room where the blackboard is clean. In this room, there is no need for X’s and O’s. The Dallas Cowboys who voluntarily enter the room climb into the team’s new sensory deprivation tank, a white fiberglass box that is eight feet long, four feet wide and four feet high. One by one, they float on their backs in water for an hour at a time in a peaceful world where their minds can be cleared of mistakes and pressures, and then refilled with information that can help win football games.

”The think tank,” said D.D. Lewis, the linebacker. The Dallas organization, given credit for bringing football into the computer age during the 1960’s, is trying something new for the 80’s. The Cowboys will experiment with a new teaching method that combines two ideas -closed-circuit television and a controlled environment.

Some research has shown that the use of videotape on television screens can increase learning. And the controlled environment – a dark, enclosed, weightless, timeless space aided by a heavy salt solution warmed to body temperature – can isolate the player from the world, eliminate distractions and simplify learning.

This environment is a long way from the traditional football classroom with its rows of chairs and reels of film. Soon after the film Altered States put the idea of floating into the national consciousness, the people who call themselves America’s Team are talking more about reaching the alpha state than the end zone. Once the television screen is installed directly over the player’s head as he floats on his back, the Cowboys will attempt to improve an athlete’s rate of learning, and eventually his performance, through the use of edited information given on an individual basis.

”I think you will see in five to 10 years there will be a drastic change in the utilization of videotape by football teams, or sports teams,” said Joe Bailey, the club’s vice president for administration. ”If you assume that coaches are teachers, and if you look into the classrooms of today, they’re probably a little bit different than the classrooms you were in. I think there’s a brave new world out there as far as the education process is concerned.”

Or, as Coach Tom Landry said, ”You just have to get an edge someplace.” How the Cowboys look for their edge, and what they do to achieve it, has been debated. Steve DeVore, one of the creators of SyberVision, a California company that has researched the concept of improving physical performance through visual stimulation, was critical of the way the Cowboys plan to use videotape as a learning tool in the tank environment. ”It’s a gimmick,” Mr. DeVore said.

Mr. DeVore said that one hour of training under the company’s system, which does not involve the use of tanks, can have the same effect as 10 hours on a practice field. ”It’s a powerful, powerful process,” Mr. DeVore said of the use of videotapes as a learning tool to improve physical performance. ”If it’s in the wrong hands, in an environment that cannot be controlled, it can be dangerous. It’s like fire. It can warm you, but if it gets out of control, it can burn you.”

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From Rick Telander’s 1981 SI article “Hell On Wheels Having Mastered The System“:

The real problem with emotion in the Dallas setup is that, like Dorsett’s resilience, it doesn’t compute. “America’s Team” has been skillfully manufactured to dispatch opponents with methodical precision. Any new device which may enhance the juggernaut is tested–the latest being a Sensory Deprivation Tank, a silent, water-filled coffin, in which, according to Dorsett, Kicker Rafael Septien lives–and anything that can be computerized, is. The motifs are conservatism (players are encouraged to marry, buy homes and settle in the community) and stability (the ruling quartet–owner Clint Murchison, Schramm, Brandt and Landry–has been with the club since its inception 21 years ago). The result is The System, and a team that is remarkably consistent–could any other club lose a quarterback like Staubach and not miss a beat?–but which seems to lack soul.•

 

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“In Professional Football The Use Of The Computer Has Proliferated Enormously During The Last Five Years”

July 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve mentioned before that Tom Landry, legendary coach of the Dallas Cowboys, was computer savvy in the 1970s (here and here), but the team’s faith in AI stretches back a decade prior, when original GM Tex Schramm invested in some hardware to help crunch numbers for the draft, hoping to remove confirmation bias and other human negatives from the equation. The opening of “Make No Mistakes About It,” Tex Maule’s 1968 Sports Illustrated article:

“The best computer in the world today is a small machine about the size and consistency of a ripe cantaloupe. It can digest, evaluate and extrapolate more data than the most sophisticated hard-metal device yet evolved and can do it quicker and better. The huge computer complex—a machine that takes up more than a thousand feet of floor space—has one advantage over the little one. It has a better memory.

Both types of machine are used in modern professional football, and next week they will be working overtime as the combined National and American football leagues meet to draft this year’s crop of eligible players. The little machines—the cantaloupes—rest in the skulls of the coaches and scouts of the game. The big one—the computer machine—accepts the data given it by the little ones, analyzes it, shuffles through its memory bank and returns black and white judgments to the brains for further evaluation.

In professional football the use of the computer has proliferated enormously during the last five years. The trend began with the escape of a general manager from a professional football team to a short term as an assistant to CBS Sports Director Bill MacPhail. It grew with the immigration of an Indian statistics expert to the U.S. and reached fulfillment when a young man who had made his living taking pictures of newborn babies in Milwaukee hospitals gave up his job to follow his hobby. The three together—led by the ex-CBS executive—easily developed the most intelligent scouting system in all sports.

Tex Schramm, formerly general manager of the Los Angeles Rams and now president of the Dallas Cowboys, decided upon computerized consideration of football players while he was associated with CBS. The Rams, during the years Schramm worked for Owner Dan Reeves and luxuriated in what was then by far the most efficient scouting system in pro football, consistently came up with the best draft in the National Football League and just as consistently lost to other teams that grabbed their discards. Deluged with fine young talent in those years, the Rams tended to drop ripening players in favor of bringing in the new ones.

‘While I was with CBS, I thought the whole thing out very carefully,’ Schramm said the other day. ‘I decided that I had undervalued experience and overvalued youth. And I decided, too, that I would have to find an objective method of deciding on the worth of a football player when I went back into pro football. The only defect in the Ram scouting system was that the people involved all had built-in prejudices of one sort or another. I thought we had to find a way to judge players without emotion. We used computers to figure scores and standings when I was in charge of CBS coverage of the Winter Olympics in 1958, and I discussed using computers to evaluate football players with IBM experts then. But I didn’t get a chance to put the idea into operation until 1962, when I was with the Cowboys.’

As examples of what Schramm means by emotional judgment, he admits that for years he has been partial to speed to the exclusion of other qualities when judging the ability of a player. ‘If a guy can run a 9.4 hundred,’ he says, ‘I’ll overlook a lot of faults. Some coaches have built-in prejudices against small colleges, and some coaches feel that a Big Ten player automatically is good. There are prejudices for and against regions and for and against individual coaches. These prejudices all lead to inaccurate judgments.’

Restored to football in 1960, when Clint Murchison bought the Dallas franchise, Schramm hired Photographer Gil Brandt of Milwaukee as his chief scout and installed a detailed and expensive scouting system. Because there were so many other details to be mastered, it was not until 1962 that he began to solve the problem of objective analysis. In that year the Cowboys were approached by a subsidiary of IBM, Service Bureau Corporation, which was trying to develop a market in handling pro football accounting systems. Schramm countered with the suggestion that SBC try to develop a method for applying computers to the multiple problems of scouting. Eventually SBC sent an Indian—Salam Qureishi—to Texas to look the situation over.”

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“Could It Hurt If They Were Balanced By Hugh Hefner’s Ideal Of 1960s American Manhood?”

July 14, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

In the decade that the term “hooters” was coined, the 1970s, the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders plunged into the modern breast era, donning outfits with necklines that just a few years earlier might have gotten a go-go club shuttered. GM Tex Schramm had been gradually trimming the former “Cowbelles” cheer-squad suits, but in 1972 the women really busted out. Coach Tom Landry, a computer geek and Jesus freak, was not pleased. From The Last Cowboy by Mark Ribowsky, via the excellent Delancey Place:

“The vibe in Thousand Oaks at summer camp in 1967 contained a strange brew of old and new currents. The Cowboys’ first winning season had taken the team so far that it accumulated almost mythical properties in Dallas and the exigency for a grander scope. Clint Murchison Jr. relocated the Cowboys’ offices again, now to the Expressway Tower, an opulent fifteen-story glass structure at 6116 North Central Expressway that Murchison built on property he had bought expressly for the purpose. He put the organization on the eleventh floor, its picture windows offering sweeping vistas of the city. He also rented out a ground-floor space to the Playboy Club, which catered to the same upscale, male-dominated crowd that Murchison hosted in the Cowboy Club at the Cotton Bowl during home games. Not for a minute did Murchison consider that his coach might be embarrassed to have as neighbors cleavage-displaying young women wearing bunny ears and cottontails. The Cowboys were the hippest party in town, and the juxtaposition fit. Neither did he mind if players repaired to the Playboy Club after a hard few hours at the practice facility, which was under a big bubble behind the building. Landry already had the squares’ allegiance; could it hurt if they were balanced by Hugh Hefner’s ideal of 1960s American manhood?

Tex Schramm, for one, saw no downside to that equation. Working from the same idea, he junked the Cowbelles that off-season and created a new cheerleading squad, one that would remind no one of high school girls in hoop skirts and sweaters. Instead, the Cowgirls were professional go-go dancers hired to shake their pompoms while wearing hot pants and tight vests, showing off ample racks and bare midriffs. When Landry learned of it, he nearly had cardiac arrest. Years later in his memoirs, he was still exercised, saying that while the Cowgirls ‘transformed sideline entertainment,’ and that it was an example of Schramm’s lust to foster ‘a high profile image of style, flair, and maximum visibility,’ it also ‘sexually exploited the young women by pandering to the baser instincts of men.”

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“The Computer Reveals What Plays They Used Under What Conditions And How Often”

September 24, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

I tend to think of analytics in sports as a recent invention, but Tom Landry, square-jawed coach of America’s Team–God’s Team, really–the Dallas Cowboys, was apparently a computer-friendly technocrat back in the 1970s. From “Tom Landry Is a Believer: in Himself, His Printouts, His Cowboys and His Lord,” Kent Demaret’s 1977 People article about the laconic leader:

“The process starts on Monday. Game films from the day before are shown, and each player’s performance evaluated and graded. That done, Landry turns to computer printouts—bound into a book the size of the Manhattan phone directory—for a minute analysis of the next opponent. The computer reveals what plays they used under what conditions and how often. As the week progresses Landry and his coaching staff absorb the mass of data, design countermoves and settle on a game plan for both offense and defense. The offense is rarely changed. ‘You don’t spend three days working up a game plan and getting all the players ready, only to change it during a 10-minute halftime,’ Landry says. ‘You just go out there and execute it better than they can execute a defense against it.’ Such intensive preparation motivates the team, he adds, far more successfully than locker room histrionics. ‘Confidence comes from knowing what you’re doing,’ says Landry. ‘If you are prepared for something, you usually do it. If not, you usually fall flat on your face.’

Not all those who now play or have played for Landry admire his push-button approach.”•

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“I’m one of the best-known cowboys in Texas,” 1986:

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