Doubleheaders have been common in baseball for 100 years.
But a double-header in football?

Perhaps you think it has never happened, but it has. And it was done by none other than the Browns from the early 1960s until the first part of the 1970s.

Really.

Say what you want about former Browns owner Art Modell – and we all have done so, with me leading the pack – but, especially in the early years of his ownership, he had a keen and creative mind honed from his days in TV advertising in New York.

As such, in his second year with the Browns, 1962, he came up with the idea of hosting a preseason double-header. Cleveland Stadium was huge, seating over 84,000 – in excess of 85,000 if you counted standing-room – and Modell figured that the four teams could all take home a tidy sum by splitting the profits from a gate like that.

So he did the legwork to set it up. In the first game, at 6:30 p.m., the Detroit Lions played the Dallas Cowboys, in just their third season of existence. In the second contest at 9, the Browns faced the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Yes, you saw those start times right, just 2½ hours apart. Before there were sponsors for every single facet of contests and enough TV timeouts to choke an elephant, games zipped right along at a clip of about only two hours.

Just as Modell envisioned, it was a rousing success. A a crowd of 77,683, the largest ever to see a Browns preseason contest in Cleveland to that point, showed up at Cleveland Stadium for the first DH 53 years ago.

And the double-headers got only more popular, with crowds of:

*83,218 in 1963.

*83,736 on this date 49 years ago, Sept. 5, 1964.

*83,118 in ’65.

*83,418 in ’66.

*84,236 in ’67.

*84,918 in ’68.

It hit a crescendo in 1969 when 85,532, still the second-largest crowd ever to see the Browns play in Cleveland for any kind of game, attended as the Buffalo Bills played the Chicago Bears, followed by the Browns versus the Green Bay Packers.

The Packers were almost annual opponents for the Browns in these double-headers, appearing five times in the six-year period from 1964-69.

The last of the 10 double-headers was in 1971. By that time, with the popularity of pro football increasing at a meteoric rate, splitting the gate four ways was no longer attractive enough financially. Two teams could play at one of their stadiums and make more money than they could by traveling to a neutral site.

The last special, two-for-the-price-of-one deal for a Browns preseason game occurred in 1972. There was no first game. Rather, it was replaced by a concert featuring Ella Fitzgerald and Tony Bennett, followed by a game between the Browns and Minnesota Vikings.

But disaster struck when a huge rainstorm caused the stage on which the concert was held to sink into the stadium turf like a lead weight. Players from the Browns locker room had to be recruited to help push the stage off the field.

It had finally rained on Art Modell’s parade of preseason double-headers, but not before the idea had made its mark both financially and historically.