NFL NEEDS TO FOLLOW MLB’S TRADITION OF HONORING BROWNS PIONEERS

By STEVE KING

The NFL has long been a marketing machine.
The biggest pro sports league in the history of the world rarely misses an opportunity to promote itself. In fact, if it does fail to do so in any realm, there’s usually a good reason.
Major League Baseball, which does a poor job of marketing itself, will have one of its biggest — probably THE biggest, in fact — annual promotions on Friday when it celebrates Jackie Robinson Day, the 75th anniversary of when he broke the sport’s color barrier by playing in a game for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947. As part of that, every player and coach on every MLB team wears Robinson’s No. 42 in honor of him. It is really cool, a brilliant idea for a sport that too often fails to seize upon perfect chances to get its name and its game out there in a positive light.
In seeing that, then, along with watching MLB steal all the diversity thunder, and with the fact the league needs all the help it can with good publicity concerning diversity, you would think the NFL would do something of the like with Browns Pro Football Hall of Famers Bill Willis and Marion Motley, who were the first players in any pro sport, not just football, to permanently break the color barrier coming out of World War II when they played in the team’s first-ever regular-season game on Sept. 6, 1946. That was more than eight months before Robinson made his debut. In fact, when Robinson got called up by the Dodgers, he contacted Willis and Motley for pointers on how to handle it.
It could be part of the league’s opening week celebration since the time frame is about the same, or it could be moved to Week 2 if opening week is big enough by itself to be a stand-alone event. Either way, the fact that no such celebration has ever been planned on an annual basis by the NFL is frustrating, disappointing and just plain wrong. It’s ignorant, disparaging and disrespectful to the legacies of those two heroes, to be honest.
That the Browns have obviously never pushed for it is even worse, if that’s possible. And, trust me, it is..
Yikes!
It just reinforces the notion — er, the undeniable fact — that the Browns current regime has little or no respect for the original Browns franchise.
That’s sad.