By STEVE KING
It may be hard to fathom now because they are the only two original NFL franchises from the pre-AFL merger days that have yet to play in a Super Bowl, but the Browns and Detroit Lions, who meet on Sunday at FirstEnergy Stadium, were the teams to beat for a good portion of the 1950s.
Between them, with three each, they captured six of the 10 NFL titles handed out from 1950-59, the Browns getting theirs in 1950, ‘54 and ‘55 and the Lions winning in 1952, ‘53 and ‘57. The Browns‘ championship in 1954 came at the expense of the Lions, 56-10, and all three of Detroit’s came at the expense of Cleveland, 17-7 in 1952, 17-16 on a late touchdown pass in ‘53 and by 59-14 in 1957. That last win, in which they got revenge for the whipping they took from the Browns three years before, provided the Lions with what is still their last league title.
In fact, they have not even played for a league title since, and have appeared just once — in 1991 — in an NFC title game, which, just like in the AFC, is the doorstep of the Super Bowl.
The Browns, on the other hand, have played for a trip to the Super Bowl on five occasions, in 1968 and ‘69 in the last two NFL Championship Games before the completion of the merger with the AFL, and in those three AFC Championship Games against the Denver Broncos in 1986, ‘87 and ‘89. So, then, while the Browns and Lions are almost always lumped into the same pile because of their failure to reach the Super Bowl, the Browns’ resume since the 1950s, which includes that 1964 NFL title win over the Baltimore Colts, is much, much better.
I watched Detroit’s one-sided championship game victory over the Browns in 1957, or at least that’s what I have been told. But I was not a willing viewer.
As the story goes, I was doing what every two-year-old kid, then and now, likes to do, watching cartoons on TV, on that Sunday a few days after Christmas 64 years ago. Just as was explained in the movie, “Back to the Future,” when Marty McFly jettisoned back to 1955 and had dinner with his mom and grandparents, families in that era had just one TV. It was preposterous to think anyone had two. I was occupying our lone Zenith, which was as big and heavy as a Mini Cooper, so when it came time for the Browns-Lions game at 1:30, my dad turned to Channel 8 in Cleveland (WJW).
I screamed bloody murder, which brought the woman of the house, and its big boss, my tiny mom, into the living room. She pointed at my dad with her arthritis-stricken right index finger from working in the factory at Goodrich in Akron during World War II and said, more or less, in a Lee Corso-like manner, “Not so fast, my friend. You’ll turn back to the cartoons so he can
watch them until they’re over.”
That was at 2 o’clock, which meant my dad, a huge Browns fan right from the start in 1946, had to listen on the radio to the first half-hour of the game. With the way the game turned out, as Detroit jumped out to a big early lead and never looked back, perhaps that was best. When it came to viewing this game from a Browns perspective, less was much more.
Hopefully things will go much better for the Browns andtheir fans, young and old, on Sunday.
