Can the Cavaliers repeat next season?
Can they win the NBA championship again?
Geez, lighten up, Francis.
Come on, man, pump the breaks on looking ahead to the 2016-17 season already. Aren’t they still sweeping up confetti and empty champagne bottles in Downtown Cleveland?
Sure, but in reality, the thought of repeating is indeed in the back of everyone’s minds even now, most especially that of General Manager David Griffin, whose job it is to maintain the roster so that the Cavs can go back-to-back, something that no Cleveland team has done since the 1954-55 Browns. Just before that happened, the 1946-50 Browns five-peated, as it were.
But it’s hard to win back-to-back titles. Just ask the Golden State Warriors.
Or another Bay area team, the San Francisco Giants.
Or the Kansas City Royals, who are looking up at the Indians in the Central Division.
Or the New England Patriots.
Or the Seattle Seahawks.
Or the …
… 1964 Browns, whose title, of course, was the last by a Cleveland team until the Cavs did it a week and a half ago. Head coach Blanton Collier’s 1965 club came very close to winning it all again, getting back to the NFL Championship game with ease but falling to the Green Bay Packers 23-12 on a cold, muddy day at Lambeau Field. The sloppy track that afternoon perfectly suited the Packers, who had a power offense and liked to run the ball, and was a real limitation to the Browns, who had a big advantage in speed and could hurt teams just as much with Frank Ryan’s passing as they could with Jim Brown’s running, as evidenced by the fact Ryan threw three touchdown passes to Gary Collins to spur the 27-0 shellacking of the Baltimore Colts in the 1964 title game.
And oh, did we mention that the snowstorm causing the field conditions to deteriorate, came in overnight? When the Browns went to bed in their Appleton, Wis. hotel the night before the game, the weather was dry and clear. They fell asleep delighted, for they had big plans on how that fast track could help them run past the Packers.
The weather the next morning was so bad, in fact, and caught everyone by such a surprise, that the Browns’ trip to Green Bay took a lot longer than expected and they arrived at the stadium way later than they wanted.
Oh, well.
One more thing: To get to the title game, the Packers had to defeat the Colts 13-10 in a playoff after the teams had finished the regular season tied for first place at 10-3-1 in the Western Conference. In the playoff, the Colts were so banged-up at quarterback that they had to use running back Tom Matte, an East Cleveland Shaw High School and Ohio State product, under center. He had played quarterback for the Buckeyes, which, with Woody Hayes coaching the team, was like being another running back.
The wrist band Matte wore with the plays written on it is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He threw for just 40 yards in the game, played in more typically bad Green Bay weather (a heavy fog). Still, the Colts had a 10-0 halftime lead and still were ahead until the Packers tied it up with a fourth-quarter field goal.
As for the Browns, there was no such late-season drama. They finished the regular season with an 11-3 record, getting their most wins since 1953. It was a half-game better than their 10-3-1 mark of 1964.
Whereas the 1964 team didn’t clinch the Eastern Conference championship until the final weekend of the regular season, edging out the St. Louis Cardinals (9-3-2) by just a half-game, the 1965 Browns steamrolled to the title. They beat out the up-and-coming Dallas Cowboys and the arch rival New York Giants, who tied for second place at 7-7, by a whopping four games, a lot in a 14-game season.
The Cards? They nosedived, tying for next-to-last place at 5-9. Despite that poor finish, they did have a big highlight in 1965, and it was their throttling of the Browns at Cleveland, 49-13, in Week 2. The Browns’ other two defeats that year were by 27-17 to the Minnesota Vikings on Halloween, during which crews shot background footage for the movie, “The Fortune Cookie,” and by 42-7 to the lowly Los Angeles Rams in the next-to-last game of the regular season after they had clinched the title and rested a lot of their starters.
The Browns scored 363 points, or 52 less than in 1964. They also allowed 325 points, or 32 more than the year before.
The reason for the scoring drop-off was two-fold. First, Ryan had injured his shoulder in the Pro Bowl after the 1964 season (when he was clobbered by Colts defensive end Gino Marchetti, who was angry because he thought the Browns had poured it on them in the title game). In any event, that causing Ryan’s numbers to fall from a league-leading 25 touchdowns to just 18.
In addition, wide receiver Paul Warfield, the Warren (Ohio) Harding High School and Ohio State product who had a sensational rookie season in 1964 by leading the team in receptions (52), receiving yards (950), average yards per catch (17.7) and TD grabs (nine), missed almost all of the season with a separated shoulder (what’s with these shoulder injuries?). He had just three receptions for 30 yards and no scores.
In Warfield’s absence, Collins had a great season with 50 receptions for 884 yards (17.7) and 10 TDs. But nobody stepped up at the other wideout, making the Browns easier to defense.
Jim Brown was his usual great self. In what turned out to be his final season, his numbers – a league-leading 1,544 rushing yards, a 5.3 yards-per-carry average and 17 TDs – were all better than he had in 1964.
The members of the Browns of that era will tell you to this day that the 1965 team was better than the one in ’64, but it wasn’t good enough to win a championship.
Let’s hope that the Cavs, a year from now, are not bemoaning the same thing in saying that they thought their 2016-17 club was better than the one this year, but that it didn’t earn a title.
