EDITOR’S NOTE: Leading into Sunday’s game between the Browns and Miami Dolphins at Huntington Bank Field, this is the second of a four-part series on Friday being the 60th anniversary of the Browns winning the 1964 NFL championship.

By STEVE KING

Frank Ryan’s three touchdown passes to wide receiver Gary Collins will forever be the lasting memory of the Browns’ 27-0 victory over the Baltimore Colts exactly 60 years ago in the 1964 NFL Championship Game at Cleveland Stadium.

And that’s understandable. Really, it’s obvious. How could it be anything else? That was — and remains — one of the greatest performances in pro football title game history.

Despite that, there are also other things that allowed the Browns to pull off the huge upset.

First of all, there was the general mindset right from the get-go by second-year head coach Blanton Collier that, with the Colts being so good, this had to be a total team effort if the Browns were going to have even a chance to win. He had a saying, “It’s amazing what can get done when nobody cares who gets the credit,” and he used it in every facet of the game plan offensively, defensively and on special teams. The players completely bought into it, and it made this the most complete team effort in Browns history.

Every player was given a task and asked to do it to the best of his ability. They all did so.

Think about this: Browns running back Jim Brown carried 27 times for 114 yards against the best defense not only in the game at the time, but also one of the best in league history. However, he was not really the focus of the offense. His job was just to run the ball enough, and well enough, that it could open up the Cleveland passing game. He had a big ego, but he put it aside and followed instructions.

Despite the fact that the Colts were considered to have the best secondary in all of football, offensive coordinator Dub Jones, who had been a key running back on those early Browns teams in the 1940s and ‘50s, thought the team could exploit Baltimore by going right at that secondary. No one had really done it, or even attempted it, really, because it seemed like a recipe for disaster. The Browns weren’t afraid of that. They thought that Ryan throwing to Collins and rookie Paul Warfield downfield had a chance to really flip the script in this game.

It took until the second half for the Browns to get untracked offensively, as the game was scoreless at halftime, but once they got rolling, things just clicked as they scored 17 points in the third quarter to break the game wide open.

Defensively, though, what the Browns did was even more impressive. They had a group that would bend though not break, but on this day, defensive coordinator Howard Brinker, one of thrb top assistant coaches in the game for almost a quarter-century, thought the Browns could go right at the Colts and successfully attack them with physicality.

It started up front. Second-year defensive tackle Jim Kanicki had bulk, and he used that to neutralize the Colts’ great guard, Jim Parker. Their confrontation produced a stalemate, and for the first time all year, Baltimore could not just line up behind Parker and pound away on the ground. Kanicki was also a handful for Parker in the pass rush. That allowed the Browns to pressure quarterback John Unitas.

Nobody outside the Browns locker room saw any of that coming. It seemed inconceivable that it could happen, but it did.

In addition, cornerback Bernie Parrish got right up in the face of Baltimore’s outstanding wide receiver, Raymond Berry. Parrish refused to let him get a good, clean break off the line of scrimmage. Berry and Unitas ran a lot of timing patterns, but that rhythm got all messed up because of the way Parrish was able to force him out of his routes. 

No one had done that to Berry all season, and the Browns thought that if they tried it, it might just work, and if it did, then, because of the Colts’ reliance on the passing game, it would throw their entire offense off track. Their line of thinking was right on point.

The Browns had an outstanding coaching staff back then, and in fact, they went into most games with a big edge in that regard. And that was never more evident than in that 1964 title game, when those coaches put together an ingenious game plan and the players executed it to a T, allowing the team to win a game that nobody thought it could win, stunning the pro football world.

NEXT: “How did you tackle me?”

Steve King