Is the greatest pro football player ever, correct? Or was the greatest pro coach correct?

 

That is, is Jim Brown right? Or was Paul Brown?

 

These are great questions – very, very interesting questions – but we’ll never know the answers to them.

 

And the book on the matter closed for good 54 years ago Thursday.

 

It was May 18, 1963 that Ernie Davis finally succumbed to leukemia without ever playing a down for the Browns. He was just 23.

 

After Davis broke all of Jim Brown’s rushing records at Syracuse and went on to be the first African American to win the Heisman Trophy, Paul Brown traded running back Bobby Mitchell to Washington to get the rights to Davis, whom the Redskins at selected at No. 1 overall in the 1962 NFL Draft.

 

After the Green Bay Packers, led by Jim Taylor and Paul Hornung, whipped the Browns 49-17 early in the 1961 season, Paul Brown wondered how having two big backs like that might help his team. Mitchell, who had been drafted by the Browns in 1958, was a quick-footed, elusive, 6-foot, 192-pound scatback. Paul Brown thought Davis, at 6-2 and 212, would be a better fit to go along with Jim Brown (6-2, 232).

 

Jim Brown told me once that he thought he and Davis playing in the same backfield would not have worked.

 

“We were the same kind of runner,” he said, referring to them being big, strong and powerful. “You need different kinds of runners to complement each other.”

 

As it turned out, Jim Brown got his wish when Paul traded with, of all teams, the Packers for rookie running back Ernie Green. With the ability to be productive both running and catching the ball, just like Mitchell, the 6-2, 205-pound Green, whose size put him between that of Mitchell and Davis, ended up being one of the best backs in the NFL for the five-year period from 1963-67.

 

Jim Brown retired after the 1965 season, leaving Green to play the rest of his career with Leroy Kelly, who, at 6-foot and 202 pounds and possessing quick feet, was a lot like Green. They had great success together.

 

So who knows how Jim Brown and Ernie Davis would have done?