Chip Banks or Galen Fiss? - Browns Daily Dose

Chip Banks or Galen Fiss? Who should be on The Mount Rushmore of Browns outside linebackers?

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By STEVE KING

I’ve got a problem.

OK, OK, I hear the jokes. Yes, I actually have a lot of problems, to be sure.

But the biggest problem I have right at this moment concerns the Mount Rushmore series of great Browns players we’re running. And that is why we’re taking a one-day break to figure it all out.

Let me explain the situation to you.

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We’re to the outside linebackers in this series. I have three players of whom I’m absolutely sure. They’ll be on the Mount Rushmore when it’s revealed tomorrow. You’ll find out their names then.

But it’s the last of the four spots of which I am not at all certain. It’s not that I don’t have anyone to put there. I have two very well-qualified players, which is one too many. Therein lies the problem

I’ve had similar issues at other places thus far in the Mount Rushmore series, but I have always been able to separate the candidates, even if it was by just a razor-thin margin.

Those were tough decisions, but this is one is much, much more so.

The candidates, Chip Banks (1982-86) and Galen Fiss (1956-66), almost couldn’t be more different from one another. The only thing they share is their greatness, and even that is different.

They played in much different eras, which made the game much different and the evaluation difficult

Banks was taken by the Browns near the top of the 1982 NFL Draft, at No. 3 overall, out of USC, which was then a football factory. Fiss was picked in the 13th round, at No. 155, in a 30-round draft in 1953 out of Kansas, which has always been a basketball factory. Football? Uh, not so much.

Banks came to a Browns team that had finished 5-11 the previous season, whereas Fiss joined a club that had been to 10 straight league championship games, with seven titles, including in the two previous years.

Banks appeared to have been carved out of rock, whereas Fiss was just an average-looking linebacker size-wise.

Banks was one of the most athletic players the Browns have ever had. He was big, strong and fast. Fiss was athletic, too, in that he also played a year of minor-league baseball with the Indians.

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Banks made the Pro Bowl in four of his five seasons, which is tied for the most by a linebacker in team history, and if he had played more seasons at that level, he might well have made it into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He’s the most talented linebacker the Browns have ever had. Fiss went to two Pro Bowls in 11 seasons.

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Banks was quiet and aloof. He wasn’t a bad teammate, but he wasn’t a great one, either. Fiss was well-liked and a team leader.

Banks didn’t stand out on the big stage. When the Denver Broncos were driving 98 yards through the heart of the defense for the tying touchdown late in the fourth quarter of the 1986 AFC Championship Game, the Browns were begging for someone – anyone – to make a play to stop the march and clinch the win, and a trip to the Super Bowl for the first time. Your best players are to step up and meet those kinds of challenges, but Chip Banks did not. Other players, of course, also failed to do so, but we’re talking about Banks. Fiss, on the other hand, made a big play in the second quarter of the 1964 NFL Championship Game against the Baltimore Colts. With the game scoreless, he was the only Browns defender to correctly read a screen pass and came out of nowhere to tackle Lenny Moore for a loss. Had Fiss not done that, then Moore, who was otherwise all by himself with an open field ahead of him, would have raced – perhaps he could have even jogged — untouched into the end zone for a 73-yard score. As it was, the play deflated the Colts, who never came close to scoring the rest of the afternoon, and inspired the Browns, who went on to a stunning 27-0 upset victory.

When you add all of that together, it comes out to a dead-heat between Galen Fiss and Chip Banks. It really does. No matter how many times I did the math, and the evaluation, they were even.

So, what do I do now? What can I do?

Stay tuned.

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