You want a deep-seeded regional NFL rivalry, one filled with venom in all different directions right from the get-go?
Well, here you are. The Browns vs Bengals rivalry — the true Battle of Ohio — stands alone as one of the fiercest and most personal matchups in the league. It’s more than just a game; it’s a clash of history, pride, and legacy that will be renewed again on Sunday at Huntington Bank Field in the regular-season opener.
Oh, sure there’s Browns-Baltimore Ravens, an alter-ego rivalry, and Browns-Pittsburgh Steelers, a turnpike rivalry born 75 years ago when Pennsylvania was the only state that had a turnpike.
But with all due respect to those, they aren’t Browns-Bengals.
For those watching at home, now’s a good time to set up your space for the season. A Browns fleece throw blanket makes those couch sessions better, and a team-logo pint glass set adds some game-day spirit.
In 1970, when the Browns and Bengals were, appropriately so, thrown into the new AFC Central together in the biggest year in pro football history as the NFL-AFL merger was finalized and massive realignment took place, the fire was instantly lit.
On one hand, you had the Browns, whose young owner, Art Modell, after the 1962 season, fired Paul Brown, the coach for all 17 years of their existence and the man for whom the team is named, and replaced him with Brown’s best friend and former staff member, Blanton Collier.
On the other hand, you had the Bengals, owned and coached by Brown, who, after being out of football for four years, returned to the game when the AFL granted an expansion franchise to Cincinnati in 1967 that would begin play the following season. To say that Modell and Brown absolutely despised one another is a vast understatement. To add to it all, there was Collier, with an allegiance to both men, caught squarely in the middle.
In the the fourth week of that first season of 1970, there was the oddity of Brown being the visiting head coach for a game in the place where he had built his Pro Football Hall of Fame career, Cleveland Stadium, having to stare across the field to the home sideline where Collier was standing. The Browns held on to win a thriller, 30-27, after which Collier ran to the middle of the field to shake hands with Brown, only to see him waving a hand at him as he looked away while running to the locker room. Collier was disappointed and heartbroken. He claimed he had received Brown’s blessing to take the Cleveland job. Brown denied that, saying Collier had double-crossed him. They never spoke again.
In the return match a month later at Cincinnati’s brand-new Riverfront Stadium before 60,007, which stands as the largest Bengals crowd there, Brown got his revenge with a 14-10 win, after which his players carried him off the field on their shoulders as his team got a leg up on Cleveland in the division race en route to winning the title with an 8-6 record, a game better than the 7-7 Browns.
And it has just gone on from there.
The last living tie to any of that, Mike Brown, Paul’s son, will be sitting in the visiting owner’s suite on Sunday. He grew up in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights working as a ball boy for the Browns and idolizing all of the iconic players on those early teams.
You have to wonder what will be going through his mind, and what has gone through it every year he has made the trip to Cleveland since his father died a month before the start of the 1991 season.
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