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May 19, 2015
Earlier today, WFNY’s Craig Lyndall wrote, “Everything we think we know about ‘NFL head coaches’ is based largely on generalizations rooted in mythical archetypes we’ve created.” Well, many of those mythical archetypes are based on the life and career of Paul Brown.
It should come as no surprise that NFL Films announced that their “A Football Life” series will devote an episode to the football legacy of Paul Brown that will air on the NFL Network on Friday, November 6, 2015. Appropriately, it will be shown the day after the two franchises that Paul Brown started square off, as the Cleveland Browns play the Cincinnati Bengals — in Paul Brown Stadium, no less — on Thursday, November 5.
Much of the credit for the push to finally create a Paul Brown episode should be given to ESPN Cleveland’s Tony Grossi. Grossi has taken it upon himself to be the ambassador in the media for the historic teams of the Cleveland Browns. When many in the media debated if the greatest all-time coach was Bill Belichick or Vince Lombardi, Grossi rightfully wrote an article that demonstrated that Paul Brown should not only be included in the discussion, but that he ought to win that debate.
As Grossi writes:
Paul Brown won seven league championships as coach of the Browns – four in the AAFC and three in the NFL, none more important than the team’s first season in the NFL in 1950.
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Lest you think that Brown’s influence on the NFL has long passed, consider this astonishing fact uncovered by Zender’s research: Of the 32 current NFL head coaches, 31 of them are direct or indirect descendants of the Paul Brown coaching tree.1
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The only current NFL coach with no connectivity to Brown is Chip Kelly of the Philadelphia Eagles.
NFL Films also revealed that one of the reasons that they have not yet covered Brown is that they do not have much film on his Cleveland teams since Ed Sabol founded NFL Films in 1964, the year after Art Modell fired Brown. However, in their search for footage, producer Neil Zender uncovered some wonderful tidbits of information along with some unique footage of Paul Brown in action.
[Zender’s] research did uncover some rare film footage from Brown’s years at Massillon Washington High School in the late 1930s and also in the AAFC in the 1940s – all of which was obviously authorized, if not commissioned, by Brown.
“Some of the Massillon high school games are in 35mm. It’s astonishing,” Zender said. “That’s just first-class, state-of-the-art – like movies of that time.”
No matter how the 2015 Cleveland Browns season is shaping up by early November, know that there is guaranteed to be some historic and amazing Cleveland Browns football shown on the NFL Network.
- For example, Seattle coach Pete Carroll’s second season as an NFL DB coach was spent with the Minnesota Vikings in 1985, which was Bud Grant’s last season as Vikings head coach. Grant played on the Great Lakes Naval Station team coached by Brown prior to him forming the Browns in 1946. [↩]
3 Comments
Its about goddamned time.
Also, I used to get annoyed that the old Browns never seemed to be spotlighted or honored by any NFL production/ retrospective, etc. It always seemed like they wanted everyone to believe that football started with the Packers. Now I know it’s simply a matter of the start date of NFL Films, and not some kind of vendetta or bias. Good to know.
As a Cincinnati native and Ohio State graduate; can’t wait to see it.
Yep. While baseball reveres its heroes going back more than a hundred years (Cy Young, Ty Cobb, The Babe, Walter Johnson, etc.), football generally yawns at everything that happened prior to the first Super Bowl in the late ’60s. It’s almost like it never happened.