The Father of Modern Football and the Greatest Coach Ever—Both Slighted

Guardians Tickets and Progressive Field Overview

It seems fitting, in a greatly — and even historically — negative way.

That is, the two biggest innovators in the history of pro football — both of whom are former Browns head coaches — are getting denied their just due in the same current timeframe by people who have no understanding of the sport, its integrity and its history.

There is, of course, Bill Belichick, he of the six Super Bowl championships won as a head coach, and eight overall if you count his tenure as a defensive coordinator, which you must, who was, just the other day, somehow and inexplicably denied entry into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility.

Huh?

What?

Arguably the greatest head coach of the modern era, if not all time, and someone whose ability to break down the game into the smallest components and then figure out how to excel in each one of them and use them as tools to gain wins and championships in bunches,isn’t worthy of being enshrined in Canton? The Hall exists for people like Belichick. That that fact somehow got lost in the process is a black eye for the HOF, certainly the biggest in its 63-year history. indeed, nothing else comes even close to it.

Belichick will likely get in, in 2027, but making him wait a year is so silly.

He has long been a huge fan of Paul Brown, who finished his 17-year career in Cleveland 29 years before Belichick began his five-year stint there. Belichick loves the history of the game and has a firm grasp of Brown’s significance in that respect. Brown is called “The Father of Modern Football” for all the innovations he brought to the game, from playbooks to year-round assistant coaches to film study to the helmet face mask and to the spread offense emphasizing the pass. Take away all — or even just any, really — of those things and pro football looks entirely different and falls far short of being the dominant sport in the country that it is.

That Brown intertwined all that into a career in which his first 10 teams all made it to the league championship game, and seven of them won titles, takes those innovations and ensconces them even moreso into the foundation of the sport. Make no doubt about it, he not just changed the game, but rather he also dominated it for a long period of time.

Unlike Belichick, though, Brown will never get full or noteworthy credit for that, because, since the early days of the Super Bowl’s 60-year existence, the trophy awarded to the winning team has been named not for Brown but rather for one of his friends and contemporaries, Vince Lombardi. And that will never change.

Now, don’t get me wrong, Lombardi was a tremendous head coach for the Green Bay Packers. He is, to be sure, one of the best and most storied head coaches in the history of the game. But in terms of adding anything to the sport or changing it and enhancing it in any grand way, he did next to nothing. His contributions to what we see today pale in comparison to all of those of Brown.

That regretful, shortsighted act of indignance will come into play, again, on Sunday night when the New England Patriots take on the Seattle Seahawks in the Super Bowl. Vince Lombardi will be remembered and revered once more as the evening winds to a halt, the confetti falls and the champions are feted, and yet the name of the venerable, iconic Paul Brown will never even be mentioned.

That is so wrong, and such a slap in the face of the history of this game.

The NFL has been able, through its over 100-year existence, to get an inordinate percentage of things right. This is not just one of the things on which it has erred, but rather clearly its biggest failure.

The black eye the game got with its slight of Bill Belichick will be very short in duration. However, the black eye it has gotten with the slight of Paul Brown has never healed in six decades, and it never will.

And that’s a real shame for everyone who loves pro football.