When Pittsburgh won its second straight Super Bowl championship with a 21-17 victory over the Dallas Cowboys following the 1975 season, iconic Cleveland Plain Dealer Browns beat writer Chuck Heaton, who was covering the game, asked Steelers head coach Chuck Noll how his team would have fared against Cleveland’s 1954 and ’55 NFL title clubs on which Noll played, the first year as a starting left guard and then as the starting left linebacker.
It seemed like a great question. Heaton had begun his long career covering the Browns for the PD in 1954, and Noll, a product of Cleveland Benedictine High School, had launched his seven-year career with the Browns in 1953. So they had met when they were both starting out with the Browns and forged a great relationship through the 1950s, and then again in 1969 when Noll was hired to coach the Steelers and began playing his former team twice a season.
When Noll said bluntly that his Steelers would have crushed those Cleveland teams and Heaton put it into a story in the next day’s paper, with a headline stating exactly that, Browns fans went wild. They had a “cathartic,” as late, lovable Cleveland radio sports talk show host Geoff Sindelar used to say.
Browns fans already despised Noll and the Steelers – the rivalry between the clubs really began to fire up in the early 1970s — and now they had a reason for despising them even more after what he said about two of the greatest teams in Cleveland history.
But if the truth be told, Noll was right on point. Those 1975 Steelers would have soundly beaten the 1954 and ’55 champion Browns.
It’s not that those Browns were bad. Hardly. In fact, it was just the opposite in that they were filled with great players, including six future Pro Football Hall of Famers and a Hall of Fame head coach in Paul Brown. But they were excelling against teams of their era. The Steelers were from an era 20 years later in which the game had changed drastically and the players had become much bigger, faster and stronger.
When comparing teams in any sport, do so by looking at how dominant they were in their own eras, not by how they might have fared if they had gotten into a time machine and actually met on the field.
