Long after Cornell Green stopped appearing in a Cowboys secondary, professional football still had work for him. In 2010, the AFC recognized him with its award for the leading scout.
It is an easily overlooked detail in the career of a five-time Pro Bowler. The Dallas Cowboys announced Wednesday that Green had died at 86, and the playing achievements understandably lead the remembrance. But his work evaluating players gives his football life a breadth that the defensive statistics cannot capture.
Green scouted for Dallas after his playing career and later worked for Denver. The 2010 honor recognizes that profession on its own terms. A scouting honor is a different kind of recognition from a Pro Bowl selection: it concerns the work of assessing other players, rather than the performance of the evaluator in uniform.
There is a satisfying connection to his own arrival in the NFL, nevertheless. Green had played basketball at Utah State and had been drafted by the Chicago Zephyrs in 1962. The Cowboys' personnel operation under Gil Brandt offered him a football camp invitation despite his lack of college football experience.
The unusual candidate eventually became an evaluator of candidates. The symmetry is appealing because the two jobs occupy different sides of the same organizational decision. In 1962, Dallas was deciding whether Green could help its team.
In his later profession, an organization was relying on him to help evaluate other possibilities. The career placed him on both sides of that examination, with professional recognition arriving in each.
Green's basketball achievements explain why Dallas had an athlete worth considering. He was a Utah State All-American in 1961 and 1962, with 1,067 rebounds and 1,890 points over his college career. The NBA selected him 37th overall. An invitation to try another sport represented a different opportunity for someone who already had a recognized professional route.
What made the invitation consequential was Green's football work afterward. He spent thirteen NFL seasons with Dallas, from 1962 through 1974, and appeared on every regular-season date: 182 games in all. He added fifteen postseason appearances. That was a long examination against professional opponents, rather than a brief athletic novelty.
His accomplishments also resisted being confined to one position. Green earned three Pro Bowl selections while playing cornerback during his first eight seasons. After Dallas moved him to safety in 1970, he earned selections in 1971 and 1972. The AP chose him for its All-Pro first team in 1966 and 1967, before the move.
Those distinctions establish the quality of the playing career. They do not automatically qualify someone to be a scout. Evaluating whether another person can contribute is a different job from contributing yourself. Green's later AFC recognition matters because it supplies a separate professional achievement, instead of asking his playing reputation to do all the work.
