Days of Paul Brown
By Steve King
It wasn’t always this bad for the Browns.
Hardly.
In fact, it used to be just the opposite, with victories, championships and iconic players and coaches.
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It was the best – the days of Paul Brown.
That was pointed out Friday night with the debut of the NFL Network’s “A Football Life: Paul Brown.” The teaser for the hour-long show, which will be shown numerous other times over the next several weeks, is: “You don’t know football unless you know Paul Brown, the man responsible for inventing the modern game as we know it.”
Never were truer words spoken.
Brown, the man for whom the Browns are named and their head coach and general manager for the team’s first 17 seasons of existence from 1946-62, has been called “The Father of Modern Football” for all the innovations he brought to the game, such as playbooks, classroom sessions and the grading of players, year-round coaching staffs, facemasks, sophisticated passing schemes, the spread offense, radio transmitters inside helmets, an emphasis on special teams, and establishing timed 40-yard dashes as a way of determining a player’s football speed.
Why 40 yards?
As Brown reasoned, the only time during a game when a player sprints unimpeded in a straight line over a great distance is when he’s covering a punt, and an average punt goes roughly 40 yards.
Speaking of running fast, unlike most other pro coaches at the time, Brown valued speed much more than he did size. Way back then, he saw where the game was going, and where it’s at today with the emphasis on speed.
Speed always trumps size. Always.
But Brown knew the value of size as well in certain instances. His first set of wide receivers were Hall of Famer Dante Lavelli and Cleveland Browns Legend Mac Speedie, who would also be in the HOF had he not jumped to the Canadian Football League after the 1952 season. Lavelli, a Hudson High School graduate who was playing for Brown’s eventual national champions at Ohio State in 1942 before suffering a season-ending injury early in the year, was an even 6 foot and 191 pounds, which was big for the time and is still big considering the size of most of the Browns’ current wideouts. Speedie was even bigger – much bigger, in fact – at 6-3 and 203.
A wingback who arrived in Cleveland in that third season 1948 and caught a lot of passes as well – 171, including 24 for touchdowns — over his eight years, was bigger than either one of them at 6-4 and 202.
With their size, then, Lavelli, Speedie and Jones were matchup headaches for the much smaller cornerbacks, or defensive halfbacks, as they were called then.
And did we mention that Brown was using African American players – a good number of them, really – before most teams were even considering such?
Two members of Brown’s first Cleveland team in 1946, Columbus East High School product Bill Willis, who played for Brown on Ohio State’s first national championship team in 1942, and the greatest Canton McKinley High School Bulldog ever in a 6-foot-1, 232-pound locomotive of a fullback named Marion Motley, both of whom are Pro Football Hall of Famers, were the players who permanently broke the color barrier not just in pro football, but in pro sports overall, coming out of World War II.
They played their first game for the Browns on Sept. 6, 1946, a full eight months and then some before Jackie Robinson, who is almost exclusively given credit for permanently breaking the pro sports color barrier, suited up for baseball’s Brooklyn Dodgers in April 1947.
You may be wondering how “an emphasis on special teams” goes down as one of Brown’s innovations. That’s easy.
Hall of Famer Lou Groza, a Martins Ferry High School product who was recruited to Ohio State for Brown but never got to play for him because of serving in World War II, turned into the game’s first great kicker after joining the Browns in that inaugural season of 1946. The player being named college football’s best kicker every season wins the Lou Groza Award. That says it all.
Groza was joined in 1947 by Horace Gillom, the best punter in team history and a Cleveland Browns Legend. Gillom, another African American who was called by Brown “the greatest high school player I ever coached’ when he played for the coach at Massillon High School, led the NFL in punting in both 1951 and ’52, the Browns’ second and third years in the league.
The Browns have 15 players in the Hall of Fame, one of the largest totals for any team. Eleven of them, five of whom being African Americans, were brought in by Brown, the franchise’s 16th Hall of Famer.
So Brown was bringing in African Americans not because he wanted to make a splash socially, which would have been exploiting those men, but because he knew they could play and as such should have the same opportunity to be on his team as white players.
And then there’s Brown’s coaching tree. It’s not a tree, really. It’s more like a forest.
With Don Shula.
Chuck Noll.
Bill Walsh.
Weeb Ewbank.
Blanton Collier.
Walt Michaels.
Enough?
While all of these things were big, they were made so much more so by the fact that it was accompanied by winning – lots of winning, a historic amount of winning, in fact. All of Brown’s first 10 Cleveland teams made it to the league championship game, with seven of those clubs winning titles. It is a consecutive run of excellence that had never happened before, has not happened since and will never happen again.
So there you go. This guy, Paul Brown, thought out every aspect of the game completely, trying to find a better way to do it and, in aspects where no one was doing it, simply the courage, wisdom and farsightedness to do it. In fact, he was so far ahead of the curve – ahead of his contemporaries – that he nearly lapped the field.
We can only hope that current Browns owner Jimmy Haslam, General Manager Ray Farmer and head coach Mike Pettine – and perhaps some of their players, particularly the more prominent ones who are expected to be part of the core of the team going forward, no matter who is the GM or head coach – were watching the Paul Brown special last night. And if they weren’t, let’s hope they catch one of the replays.
If and when they do, they’ll realize how they’ve played a part – significantly so, some might argue — in messing this thing up royally – a thing that used to be greater than all the rest for a sustained period of time because the guy who orchestrated it, Paul Brown, was more famous and influential than most people will ever know.
Perhaps, then, it will cause them to stop and think and make a stronger commitment to get the Browns back on track – like the days of Paul Brown.
At least it should.
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