If you ever wondered what the Landry Shift was, or you just miss seeing the Dallas Cowboys do the shift - here is a collection of them.
I tried hard to include players that wound up coaching in later years. In one of the plays coach Dan Reeves of Denver Broncos got some good yards and coach Mike Ditka of the Bears was the one that Staubach really drilled the ball to. I made sure I had Bullet Bob Hayes and Tony Dorsett and I wanted to include Morton, Staubach, and Danny White. Of course I included a couple key players like Pearson and DuPree. Each of the shifts is a little bit different. My favorite is @2:00 where the end steps closer to the line that almost drew an off sides.
Other teams did indeed do various versions of the line shift, most especially Kansas City but Tom Landry and the Cowboys became most famous for it and fans of nostalgia love it. A bit of trivia for those who don’t know this - when the NFL created the expansion team of the Cowboys there was already a professional team in Dallas called the Dallas Texans. They played for three years right alongside the Cowboys taking turns in the Cotton Bowl. They later moved to Kansas City and became the Chiefs. So that means both teams were doing the shift in the Cotton Bowl. Maybe the cotton bowl is where it was born!
In those days hardly anyone left the Cowboys. Landry was an engineer and his shift was extremely complicated. To pull it off required years of training with the same guys. With the advent of salary caps and free agency it got too difficult to maintain. It was indeed effective, for the time in which it appeared. Here is a link to an article in the Dallas Morning News of an interview with Bill Bellichick talking about his experience with the shift:
www.dallasnews.com/sports/cow...