PAUL BROWN DIDN’T PASS UP A CHANCE TO EMBARRASS EAGLES TWICE IN 1950
By STEVE KING
All along when the Cleveland Browns were running roughshod over everything the All-America Football Conference could throw at them from 1946-50, the hard-liners from the NFL just shook their heads and laughed.
They were not impressed in the least bit that the Browns were on their way to winning all four of the league’s championships while compiling a staggering overall mark of 52-4-3. They thought the Browns were a “Mickey Mouse” team from a “Mickey Mouse” league in comparison to the much older and much more established NFL.
Not surprisingly, that bothered Browns head coach Paul Brown and his players a lot. They were proud of their accomplishments and were convinced that their competition in the AAFC was good and in a lot of ways on par with that in the NFL. They knew they could not just play with any of the NFL teams, but rather that they could beat them — and most of them handily.
The plot thickened when, following the 1949 season, the AAFC folded and three of its teams — the Browns, San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Colts — were absorbed into the NFL beginning in 1950. But the Browns were the main team the NFL wanted, and to prove their point about the alleged huge disparity between the leagues, the schedule-makers pitted the Browns against the two-time defending champion Philadelphia Eagles at Philadelphia’s Municipal Stadium in the 1950 opener They put the game as the only one to be played on Saturday night before the rest of the league’s team opened the next afternoon, thus thrusting it into the spotlight for all to see. It was the Super Bowl 16 years before that game came into existence.
The NFL hard-liners were convinced that the game would be a rout, and they were right. Only it was the Browns doing the routing, blowing out the Eagles 35-10. The Browns amassed 448 yards of total offense, including 346 yards passing and three touchdowns from quarterback Otto Graham.
Most everybody from the NFL was impressed by the Browns’ performance. Perhaps the only one who wasn’t was Eagles head coach Earle “Greasy” Neale. He thought, with all their passing and sophisticated routes and timing, well beyond what anybody in the NFL was doing at the time, that the Browns were merely a finesse team. He said if the Browns played “real football” and lined up and ran the ball, that it would be a different story.
That made Brown and the Browns ever more irate, So when the American Conference foes met again in Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium on Dec. 3, Brown made sure that Neale ate his words as the Browns defeated the Eagles 13-7 without ever throwing a pass — not one.’
That was 70 years ago, and everybody is passing the ball all the time now. So when the Browns and Eagles meet on Sunday at FirstEnergy Stadium, located on the footprint of the old place, you can bet that neither team will limit its play selections to only runs.
