It’s Jim Brown times two and a guy named Josh

By STEVE KING

The NFL will play a 17-game regular season beginning in 2021, which is great news for fans.

The longer the regular season – and, for that matter, the more teams in the postseason – the better. People love the NFL and can’t get enough of it, regardless of the form, save for perhaps the preseason, which nobody other than coaches like.

But what will a longer regular season do to individual records for the teams?

That remains to be seen, but it has to be taken into consideration. For instance, a 1,000-yard rushing season, which used to be the measuring stick for runner backs’ greatness back in the day, will continue to lose its luster. A runner will have now have to average only about 59 yards per game to reach 1,000, down from the already-paltry 62 required in a 16-game schedule. That doesn’t exactly conjure up memories of Jim Brown, Marion Motley and Leroy Kelly.

Speaking of Brown, he has two of the three greatest single-season performances in Browns history.

One of them is easy to figure out. It’s 1963, when Brown showed he was the best running back of all-time – and still is – by rushing for a then NFL-record 1,863 yards in just a 14-game season, averaging 133 yards per contest and 6.4 yards per attempt. Brown came into 1963 upset that some people thought he was finished after gaining “just” 996 yards while playing through some injuries in 1962.

Yeah.

He was definitely not through, even when he retired just before training camp opened in 1966.

In his second season of 1958, in only a 12-game schedule, Brown rushed for 1,527 yards and 17 touchdowns, averaging 5.9 yards per attempt and 127 yards and 1.4 scores per contest.

The last of the Browns’ individual single-season performances came from wide receiver Josh Gordon in 2013. When his head was right, this guy could be unbelievable, as evidenced by his effort that year, when he caught 87 passes for a team-record 1,646 yards, averaging 18.9 yards per reception. Though it came in a 16-game season, he played in just 14 of them, meaning he averaged almost 118 yards per game. And did we mention that he did it while playing almost all of the time with quarterbacks Brandon Weeden and Jason Campbell, neither of whom would have been sure bets to make the varsity at  what was then known as Berea High School just a few blocks away from Browns Headquarters.