The shadow cast by the great Paul Brown will never go away.
And that’s especially the case now.
It was 52 years ago today, on Jan. 9, 1963, that Brown was fired as head coach and general manager of the Browns by team owner Art Modell.
Certainly, it was a shock. After all, the Browns were named for Brown. It would be like kicking Mr. Macy out of the department store that bears his name, or Harvey Firestone out of the tire factory that is named for him.
But in looking back, it shouldn’t have been a surprise at all, for Brown had butted heads with Modell since the day he purchased the Browns for the then-princely sum of $4 million just 22 months before. They were oil and water. They just didn’t mix at all.
In fact, they never mixed – ever — as they remained mortal enemies until the day Brown died on Aug. 5, 1991.
A guy by the name of Bill Belichick served his first game ever – the preseason opener against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Cleveland Stadium – as head coach of the Browns that night. I covered that contest and had to ask the Browns public relations staff several times to get a quote from Modell on the passing of Brown.
Finally, I was handed a copy of a two-sentence statement that was supposedly from Modell, but was insteady something that was put together by those PR people. Big shock there, huh?
In any event, It had all the warmth of a letter from the library stating that you have an overdue book.
But aside from this being the anniversary of his firing, Brown is in the news for another reason – though you may have not have heard about it, or thought about it.
The Browns have made a big, big splash in the past week by bringing in an analytics expert and making him, and those numbers, a centerpiece of their plan to get the franchise fixed.
Not surprisingly, with something so new and bold – so out of the box – there are a lot of snickers, and doubters, around the NFL. One of them on the radio the other day was former Baltimore Ravens head coach Brian Billick, the smartest man he has ever met. Yes, you read that right. “He” is Billick, and he thinks he’s a genius. No, check that, he knows he’s a genius.
But I digress.
Brown is known today as “The Father of Modern Football,” but way back in the day, when he was coming up with all of these innovations that are now commonplace in the game, people thought he was some kind of crackpot, mad scientist or just plain crazy.
This analytics approach may be the wave of the future, or it could be fool’s gold. We don’t know which one yet, and likely won’t for a long time.
But on the anniversary of Brown getting shown the door, trying something different should at least be given a chance in the town where it has already happened once, shouldn’t it?
