There are several days that you can say marked the beginning of the Browns, and Sunday is one of them.

It was exactly 80 years ago, on Aug. 30, 1946, a Friday night, that the Browns played their first preseason game, defeating the All-America Football Conference rival Brooklyn Dodgers 35-20 before a full house of almost 36,000 —35,964, to be exact — at the Rubber Bowl in Akron. It was their only “exhibition“ game, as they were called then, of the season. They would play their first regular-season game exactly a week later, on Sept. 6, at Cleveland Stadium against the Miami Seahawks, a 44-0 victory before 60,135.

A guy by the name of Bill Leib filmed all of the University of Akron Zips football games at the Rubber Bowl and it is believed that he may have filmed that Browns game and other preseason games the club played there over a 27-year span, through 1973. I even talked to a man who said he watched the film, describing to me in detail what he saw. I called Leib one time and asked him about it, but he abruptly hung up on me. I’ve always thought that I had stumbled upon the truth and he didn’t want it to be known that he might have a valuable piece of Browns history in his home. What is a fact, though is that for years, Greater Akron area high school football coaches would drop off their game film at his home on Friday nights and he would develop it overnight and they would pick up the finished copy the next morning.

Steve King