“America’s Team” doesn’t wear red, white and blue. They wear white, blue, silver and… another shade of silver. That’s right. Look closely. The Dallas Cowboys’ helmets don’t match their pants. The team that’s won five Super Bowls; the team that’s counted Roger Staubach, Tony Dorsett, Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith, Michael Irvin, Deion Sanders and others among its numbers; the team that plays under the biggest spotlight in the largest mainland state in the union—it doesn’t seem to know how to match one colour to another.
And you know who cares about that? Exactly nobody.
Tex Schramm, the Cowboys’ original president and GM, had previously worked as an executive at CBS Sports and chiefly wanted the uniform to look good on TV. And he was willing to break long-established design rules to make sure. “He would have all these uniforms—pants and jerseys—and one would be a 200 shade of blue, and then the 210 shade of blue,” says Gil Brandt, a senior analyst with NFL.com who was Dallas’s VP of player personnel from 1960 to 1989, “and they were almost not distinguishable when you looked at ’em. I would imagine he put as much work into it as anything he did with the Cowboys.”
Brandt says Schramm chose blue with future merchandise sales in mind, and it paid off—the Cowboys consistently rank in the top five for annual sales on NFLshop.com. “He had a great deal of foresight and said, ‘Eventually we’re gonna be able to sell shirts and sweaters and so forth, and if they’re orange or purple you’re not going to sell a lot of ’em.’”
And while Tony Romo and Co. have a navy blue road jersey they can trot out, it’s possible you’ve never seen it. Unlike most teams in the NFL, the Cowboys wear white at home. In fact, only once last season did the team don navy blue (and then only because the Carolina Panthers chose to wear their road whites at home). The tradition started early on, when the Cowboys discovered that the white jersey was 18 degrees cooler than the dark. That gave visiting teams a distinct competitive disadvantage in the Texas heat—especially on the sunny side of the field.
As for helmet design, that had nothing to do with Schramm. According to Brandt, credit for the lid belongs to Alicia Landry, wife of inaugural Cowboys coach Tom Landry. “My Tommy is gonna be a star,” she told ownership before the first season. “You oughta put a star on the helmet.” She was dead on. Just like the uniform she helped create.
This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. Subscribe here.