Tex Schramm Biography

1920-

American football executive

Tex Schramm

It isn't easy to measure Tex Schramm's impact on professional football, for his mark is on so much of the game as we know it today. Schramm is perhaps best known for building a little-known expansion team in Dallas into one of football's most venerable franchises, so widely popular across the nation that it came to be known as "America's team." For nearly three decades he was the general manager of the Dallas Cowboys and in 1991 became the only football executive who never owned or coached a team to be elected to the Professional Football Hall of Fame. With Pete Rozelle, commissioner of the National Football League (NFL), and Lamar Hunt, founder of the American Football League (AFL), Schramm engineered the merger of the two rival leagues. He's also credited with building the NFL's first bona fide scouting system and is known as well as the father of the instant replay.