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EDITOR’S NOTE: The 2025 NFL Draft is right around the corner. This is Part 2 of a series on the five most impactful drafts in Browns history. Today we look at 1962.

When the Green Bay Packers ran over the Browns — literally and figuratively — by the thumping score of 49-17 on Oct. 15, 1961 at Cleveland Stadium, it caused Browns head coach Paul Brown to take a hard look at his team, which, while being a serious competitor in the Eastern Conference every year, had not won the conference title since 1957 and had not captured the NFL championship since 1955.

Packers fullback Jim Taylor rambled for 158 yards and four touchdowns that day in 21 carries, averaging a robust 7.5 yards per try. His backfield mate, Paul Hornung, also had a scoring run. With the running game clicking on all cylinders and garnering most of the attention of the defense, Packers quarterback Bart Starr could stand back in the pocket and count the house (75,402) as he picked apart the Browns, completing 15 of 17 passes for 172 yards and a touchdown.

Brown liked what he saw from Green Bay’s two big backs and the power rushing attack, and began trying to figure out how he could build that kind of backfield, and offensive scheme, for his team so as to have more success against the rugged, physical defense of the arch rival New York Giants, who would go on to also get blown out that year by the Packers, 37-0, in the league title game. The Browns had one big runner in 6-foot-2, 228-pound Jim Brown, but Bobby Mitchell, in being just 6-foot and 192 pounds, was a scatback who relied on his speed, quickness and agility.

So, Brown traded Mitchell to Washington for the rights to running back Ernie Davis, whom
that club had taken at No. 1 overall in the 1962 NFL Draft. Davis, who was the size of Brown, had followed him at Syracuse and broken all of his school records en route to becoming the first African American to win the Heisman Trophy. While Mitchell, after being converted to wide receiver, went on to become everything Washington could have hoped for, and more (in his first game against the Browns, in Cleveland in the second game of the 1962 season, he caught a 50-yard touchdown pass in the closing moments of the fourth quarter, twisting and turning and bobbing and weaving to cause a number of would-be tacklers to whiff, to give Washington a 17-16 upset victory,
and the team also won the return match at Washington 17-9 to provide the club its first season series sweep of the Browns), along with allowing the struggling franchise to finally break the color barrier, Davis was stricken with what was finally diagnosed as leukemia and never played a down for the Browns. He died on May 17, 1963, becoming the second of three Browns players to pass away in a 4-1/2-month period that year. It is the most tragic offseason in the history of not just the NFL, but pro sports overall.

His death followed that of Purdue defensive back Tom Bloom, the second of the team’s two sixth-round picks in the 1963 draft, on Jan. 18 when he was involved in a car accident on an icy stretch of I-70 near Dayton while returning to school with two classmates after a visit home to Weir, W. Va. Only 2-1/2 weeks after Davis’s death, on June 4, promising young safety Don Fleming, a native of Shadyside, Ohio, just 40 miles down the Ohio River from Weir, was electrocuted while working an offseason construction job in Florida when the boom he was operating struck a power line. Unlike the players of today, whose huge salaries are more than enough to sustain them financially, players back then needed a second job after the season to make ends meet.

With Davis battling his illness and the trade of Mitchell, Paul Brown was left without a competent running mate for Jim Brown as the 1962 season approached. Ironically, he found an answer to his problem on the team with which this whole sad situation started, the Packers. In the 1962 training camp, Brown contacted Green Bay head coach Vince Lombardi, with whom he had become great friends from their days competing against each other when the latter was an assistant coach with the Giants in the 1950s. After Brown explained the issue, Lombardi said he had a rookie running back drafted in the 14th round in 1962, Louisville product Ernie Green, who had shown some real ability but wasn’t going to make the team because of the presence on the roster of those two big backs and big stars, Taylor and Hornung. Lombardi said he would trade Green to the Browns, and he blossomed in a seven-year career, not just in blocking for Brown and Leroy Kelly, the Pro Football Hall of Famer who succeeded him when he retired just as the 1966 training camp was starting, but also as an outstanding runner and receiver out of the backfield in his own right. He was, in fact, one of the best backs in the league.

At 6-2 and 205 pounds, Green wasn’t as big as Jim Brown or Davis, but he was bigger and stronger than Mitchell. So, in a roundabout way that was so twisting, turning, unbelievableand, of course, sad, that it didn’t seem real, Paul Brown finally found the back for whom he was looking. The problem is, though, that Brown got to work with Green only in that rookie season, as he was, stunningly so, unceremoniously fired three weeks after the 1962 season ended.

But what would have happened had Jim Brown and Ernie Davis been able to play together? Would it have brought the Cleveland offense to another level, as Paul Brown thought it would have? We’ll never know.

Interestingly enough, though, Jim
Brown told me privately one time that he didn’t think a backfield with him and Davis would have succeeded.

“Bobby and I worked well off each other,” he said. “Our vastly differing styles — I was a bigger power guy who could run and he was a smaller fast guy with moves — and the fact we were both good, made it difficult for defenses to prepare for our offense. They had two kinds of abilities to worry about.

“Had Ernie (Davis) and I been paired together, it would have made it much easier for defenses because we were the same size and ran the same way.”

Brown also thought that the fact Green was a mix of both styles made their pairing a winner.

Brown and Green, in fact, were key parts of the Browns’ march to the NFL championship in 1964. In the title game, the heavily-favored Colts, with the best defense in the league, was so intent on stopping the Cleveland runners that they forgot about the passing attack. That gave quarterback Frank Ryan plenty of time to throw, just as Bart Starr had in that 1961 game against the Browns, and he, too, took full advantage of it, tossing three touchdown passes to third-year wide receiver Gary Collins to provide a dominating 27-0 victory.

Collins was drafted in the first round, at No. 4 overall, in 1962 out of Maryland. But because of all the focus on the Mitchell-Davis situation, he kind of got lost in the shuffle in his rookie season. The Browns struck gold with him. He was the saving grace of that 1962 draft, catching 331 passes in his 10-year for a team-record 72 touchdowns, which is 22 more than the next-closest player and a staggering total considering that he played in an era when defenders could mug receivers all over the field.

The Browns returned to the title game in 1965 and Collins caught a pass from Ryan to account for their only touchdown in a 23-12 loss to — you guessed it — the Green Bay Packers.

Collins is stuck in the Hall of the Very Good, but he should be in the Hall of Fame along with so many of the players mentioned in this piece. The fact that he isn’t there is a complete travesty.

The Browns drafted another wide receiver in 1962, in the seventh round from Ohio State, who turned out to be a Hall of Famer — in a different sport, basketball. That would be John Havlicek, who had last played football as a senior at Bridgeport (Ohio) High School, being named first-team all-state in that sport and also in baseball and basketball that year, before going on to the Buckeyes and starring as a sophomore on the school ‘s national championship basketball team in 1960. With the Browns, he made it to the final cut of training camp. He stuck, though, with the Boston Celtics and helped them become a NBA dynasty.

Steve King