A Seminal Hiring, For Both the Browns and Pro Football
EDITOR’S NOTE: We’ve been looking recently at Browns history in years ending in 5. Here’s another part of that series.
The most important personnel acquisition in Browns history?
That’s ridiculously easy. It’s the hiring of Paul Brown in 1945 as head coach and general manager for the team that would begin play the next year in the brand-new All-America Football Conference.
Actually, you could argue, and you might be right, that the hiring of Brown — just as World War II was ending and the country got set to start having some fun again — might also be the most important personnel acquisition in pro football history. Indeed, it is through the visionary capabilities of Brown, and all the innovations he wrought, that we have gotten to today in the game’s history. After all, he is known as “The Father of Modern Football.”
How different the game, and the Browns, in those dominant early years, would have been had the hiring not occurred. It changed everything, and in a positive way. That the team is named for Paul Brown is a sense of pride for everyone who roots for this team and understands history, and lineage.
That he assembled a true all-star team that, over those first 10 years, went to 10 straight league championship games, winning seven titles, an uncanny streak, is one of the key accomplishments by Paul Brown that, thankfully, will be brought back into the limelight now that the NFL has fully incorporated the AAFC’s statistics into its own.
Steve King
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