Books have been written about it.
It has been discussed in other media forms to the nth degree.
Longtime Browns fans know the story inside and out.
But in a lot of ways, when it really counts, it gets dismissed. It’s as if it never happened.
And oh, it – the Browns’ first four years of existence from 1946-49 in the All-America Football Conference — happened, all right.
I bring this up in conjunction with the attention the Cavaliers and Golden State Warriors are getting for playing three straight seasons for the NBA championship, the first time in league history, and just the fourth time in pro sports history, that it has occurred.
I saw an accompanying story in which the point was that the Cavs and Warriors both have a ways to go before they can earn a spot on the list of times that a pro sports franchise has played for a league championship in four or more consecutive seasons.
It has happened 15 times. Here are 14 of them:
*10 times – Boston Celtics from 1957-66 and Montreal Canadiens from 1951-60.
*5 — New York Islanders from 1980-84, Canadiens from 1965-69 and New York Yankees from 1960-64 and 1949-53.
*4 – Miami Heat from 2011-14, Yankees from 1998-2001, 1955-58 and 1936-39, Ottawa Senators from 1921-24, Buffalo Bills from 1990-93, Celtics from 1984-87 and Los Angeles Lakers from 1982-85.
What franchise am I omitting?
The Browns.
According to this list, the Browns are third, behind only the Celtics from 1957-68 and the Canadiens from 1951-60, in having played for the league championship six consecutive times from 1950-55, all in the NFL.
That’s true, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. In fact, it tells only 40 percent of it.
Those aforementioned first four Browns teams from 1946-49 all played in the AAFC Championship Game, winning four crowns. So when you add those four appearances to the six they had in the NFL immediately afterward, the Browns should actually be tied with the Celtics and Canadiens for first place with 10 consecutive seasons of vying for a league title.
But a lot of people ignore what the Browns did in the AAFC. Moreover, they ignore everything that every team did in that league because it was not the NFL and thus the AFFC must have been an inferior league.
If it was so inferior, though, then why did the Browns, after coming out of the AAFC, go right into the NFL and blow through that league as well? And why do the San Francisco 49ers, another of the three AAFC teams absorbed by the NFL in 1950, still exist today, having been one of the dominant franchises of the modern era with five Super Bowl championships?
No one seems to want to answer those questions.
More on this in my next post.
