Paul Brown, Forgotten Man

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Beaglebay

Beaglebay

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http://espncleveland.com/common/more.php?m=49&r=17&post_id=42461

Greatest of all time?: The New England Patriots’ fourth Super Bowl triumph in 14 years engraved Bill Belichick’s place on NFL’s Coaching Mount Rushmore, to be sure. But in the ensuing discussion of Greatest of All Time, one coach has been rudely and sadly forgotten.


For two weeks since Belichick improved his Super Bowl record to 4-2, I’ve heard the debate to name pro football’s greatest coach center exclusively on Belichick v. Vince Lombardi, the Green Bay Packers icon.
Some have even suggested that while the trophy presented to the annual NFL champion bears Lombardi’s name, Belichick may soon retire it. Belichick will be 63 when the 2015 season starts and with quarterback Tom Brady defying his age of 37, it’s possible Belichick could surpass Lombardi’s career mark of five NFL championships – three coming before the advent of the Super Bowl.


Never mind that George Halas and Curly Lambeau hold the record with six NFL championships. Those coaches hardly exist in the mindset of the current NFL because their careers ended before the Super Bowl was invented. One would have to visit the Pro Football Hall of Fame to know their lofty place in the sport’s history.
Which brings me to the coach who not only is ignored in the Belichick-Lombardi discussion, but, more importantly, is shafted by the NFL’s convenient amnesia of its own history. It seems to me the NFL has forgotten Paul Brown.


The founding coach of the Cleveland Browns has seven pro football championships on his record, including all four in the existence of the 1940s NFL-rival All-America Football Conference. Lest anyone discount those four titles, keep in mind that when the haughty NFL reluctantly absorbed the Browns in 1950, they proved their superiority by winning the NFL title in their first year. Further, they appeared in the NFL championship game six times in their first seven years in the established league, winning three.
In overseeing the NFL dynasty immediately preceding Lombardi’s, Brown revamped the coaching profession, pioneering such innovations as film study of opponents, player intelligence tests, full-time coaching staffs, face masks on helmets and using technology to transmit play-calls into the helmets of quarterbacks.


Beyond all of that, Brown’s coaching tree is in a class by itself. Assistants on Brown’s staffs who become Hall of Famers in their own right include Weeb Ewbank, Don Shula, Chuck Noll and Bill Walsh.
So why has Brown gotten lost in the shadows of Lombardi and Belichick?


More at link.
 
http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/page/greatestcoach6/greatest-coaches-nfl-history-paul-brown

Paul Brown, the first coach of the Cleveland Browns, turned the organization into a dynasty and is credited with numerous innovations that made the coaching profession what it is today.



Brown was the first to hire a full-time coaching staff that worked year-round, and he took the scouting of college players to a new level. Brown, who had a teaching background, also used extensive film study of his players and graded them. He called plays from the sideline, using alternating guards to shuttle information to the field.

Brown also helped integrate professional football. Defensive lineman Bill Willis and running back Marion Motley were two of the first African-Americans to play professional football after they joined the Browns in 1946.



Brown had already been a successful coach of his high school alma mater, Washington High in Massillon, Ohio, college (Ohio State) and military teams when the Browns began playing in the All-America Football Conference in 1946. With Brown as general manager and coach, the team named after him dominated the league. The Browns went 47-4-3 in the regular season, including a 14-0 campaign in 1948, and 5-0 in the postseason, winning all four AAFC titles before the league's surviving teams merged with the NFL in 1950.



The Browns didn't miss a beat, winning the championship in their first NFL season. And that was just the start. They reached the championship game seven times in their first eight seasons in the NFL. They won additional titles in 1954 and '55, bringing Brown's total to a record seven championships.

After Art Modell bought the team in 1961, he and Brown had frequent conflicts over Brown's level of control. In January 1963, Brown was fired. During his 17 seasons in Cleveland, the Browns finished under .500 just once.



Brown was enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1967, but his career was not finished. When the AFL put a franchise in Cincinnati in 1968, Brown came on board as an investor, coach and general manager. Brown had the Bengals in the playoffs by their third season, their first after the NFL merger, and took them to two more postseasons before he retired after the 1975 season. When the Bengals opened their new stadium in 2000, it was named after Brown.

Among the coaches who played or worked under Brown are such heavyweights as Don Shula, Blanton Collier, Weeb Ewbank, Bill Walsh and Chuck Noll.

-- Shawna Seed



It's sickening that a pygmy like Modell wielded so much destructive power.
 
To be fair, the Cleveland fans are being quick to point out in the comments section that Brown has hardly been forgotten...he has a team named after him for god sake!
 
http://itiswhatitis.weei.com/sports...10/09/11/bill-belichick-is-todays-paul-brown/

<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%"><tbody><tr><td>Bill Belichick: The modern-day Paul Brown

</td> <td style="text-transform:none; text-align:right;">09.11.10 at 1:24 pm ET</td> </tr> </tbody></table> By Mike Petraglia
FOXBORO — A famous and successful football coach once told his players that they’re only a product of their discipline, on and off the field.
“What my coaches and I accomplished during those years came from the way we handled our players,” he said. “To know and appreciate all that went into our football – in high school, college and the pros – and why we were successful, it is necessary to understand the principles that guided our teams.



“Everything had to do with people, from properly assessing a man’s character, intelligence and talent to getting him to perform to the best of his ability in a way that benefited our team. The ‘team’ was everything.”
That certainly sounds like Bill Belichick but those were actually the words of Paul Brown, the man Belichick credits for creating the system now employed by all NFL coaches and organizations.
And those words came from the 1979 biography “PB: The Paul Brown Story” co-authored with Brown by longtime Boston sportswriter Jack Clary.



Belichick, a voracious reader, is familiar with Brown’s words on coaching and the book. Before Bill Walsh‘s detailed work, “Finding the Winning Edge,” there was Paul Brown’s book. It’s no mistake that Walsh coached under Brown with the Cincinnati Bengals in the 1970s.
“Pretty much everything that we do now, he did when he was coaching 30, 40, 50 years ago,” Belichick said Friday of Brown. “He’€™s really the kind of father of professional coaches and the father of professional football. Not that other greats like [George] Halas and so forth’€¦ But the way it is now, is the way it was when Paul coached.”


And it certainly worked. Belichick won three Super Bowls in four years. Walsh led his 49ers dynasty teams to three titles in seven years. But together that’s one less than the seven NFL titles won by Brown’s Cleveland teams of the 50s and 60s. Brown led his team to the title game 11 times in 12 seasons.



“Nobody did more for football than Paul Brown did,” Belichick added.
After an ugly ending with then-Browns owner Art Modell in the mid-60s, Brown founded the Bengals in 1968. Brown oversaw a franchise that made two Super Bowl appearances in 1982 and 1989. Ironically, they were beaten both times by Bill Walsh’s 49ers. Brown passed away in 1991, handing leadership of the Bengals to his son Mike, whom Belichick says, has carried on the franchise in a way that would make his dad proud.
“I think that Mike [Brown] has done a great job with the organization. They had a terrific year last year. They have a good team. It looks like they’€™ve done some things to improve it this year. I think they do a lot of things well. They swept their division last year which is something not a lot of teams can say or have ever been able to say.



“When you have those kind of accomplishments, I think that Paul would be pretty proud of what the Bengals did last year and what they’€™re about, how they play, the way they’€™re coached, the way the organization is run. I think they do a pretty good job.”
Brown thought so much of his father that he turned away the chance for corporate sponsorship of the Bengals’ new stadium when it opened in 2000, instead choosing simply to name it after his dad.



What’s amusing to any Cincinnati native is to think how a disciplinarian like Brown would’ve handled the ‘Real World’ Bengals of 2010 with players like Chad Ochocinco and Terrell Owens. But Belichick said Friday that while Brown was known for his discipline, every coach is smart enough to understand the different personalities on their team.
“Well, I think ‘€“ not that I was there for a lot of it ‘€“ but even when Paul was coaching, every team [had] personalities,” Belichick said. “I think that’€™s part of every group you have ‘€“ football or otherwise.”


Still, it’s hard to imagine what Paul Brown would do this Sunday if Ocho scores and grabs a rifle and fires it into the air after a touchdown. Very hard.
 
To his eternal credit, nobody tries harder than BB to try and educate fans about the history of the game. He has so much knowledge that goes back to his fathers time so some what, 70 years of coaching....And he's such a keen student of the game, such an expert on it's history.
 
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/football/nfl/browns/2008-01-27-Browns_N.htm

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By Mike Bambach, USA TODAY
Watching the New England Patriots reminds Dante Lavelli of the Cleveland Browns and their glory days.
More than their talent, he marvels at the Patriots' teamwork.
"They have that cohesiveness," the 84-year-old Hall of Famer says in a telephone interview from his furniture store in Rocky River, Ohio. "And that's the ultimate achievement."

The Browns had that, too, in Lavelli's day. He says it's what carried them to pro football's first perfect season in 1948.
"Everybody talks about Miami in 1972 and now the Patriots, but we did it first," Lavelli says. "You have to get across the idea of the caliber of players with 32 teams. We didn't play any cupcakes."

The Browns also didn't play in the NFL that year, which is why the league doesn't recognize the Browns for going undefeated. Cleveland dominated the eight-team All-America Football Conference from 1946-49, winning four consecutive championships.

Their supremacy also contributed to the AAFC's demise, and the Browns merged with the NFL in 1950 along with the San Francisco 49ers and the original Baltimore Colts. "I don't think we were realizing what we were doing. We just played Sunday after Sunday," Lavelli says.
The Browns also won Sunday after Sunday. They were so dominant, compiling a 47-4-3 overall record, the AAFC mandated they give players to lesser teams.
That's how Hall of Fame quarterback Y.A. Tittle, the AAFC's 1948 Rookie of Year, was drafted by the Browns but ended up with the Colts.

The team's modest 36-man roster featured six Hall of Famers.
"Think of that," says Joe Horrigan, vice president of communications for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. "Today's rosters are 53 players and a practice squad."
Consider this: Tom Brady and the Patriots are playing their fourth Super Bowl in seven years.
Impressive?

Quarterback Otto Graham, another Browns Hall of Famer, played in 10 championship games in his 10-year career from 1946-55 — four in the AAFC, six in the NFL — and won seven. "Talk about unbreakable records," Horrigan says.
Lavelli, who was there for all 10 title games, recalls playing and winning three games in seven days on both coasts toward the end of the 1948 season.
"I was so sore I slept in the aisle of the plane," Lavelli says. "Do you think any of these teams could do that today?"
Lavelli's Browns were a close team.

"One team, one family," Lavelli says. "Everyone was a friend. That's what made the Browns; the cohesiveness."
That's the quality Lavelli admires in the Patriots. He even compares Bill Belichick to Paul Brown, Belichick's coaching hero.
"I never heard him swear," Lavelli says of Brown, his coach at Ohio State then Cleveland. "He never bawled out a player in front of others. (Belichick) handles his players like Brown. He doesn't make his players heroes."
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Another good piece Beagle.

I always liked that about Bill. When things go wrong, he accepts the blame. If a player makes a mistake he never singles them out, just says it's him and he has to do a better job coaching.

But when things go right, he deflects it to the players. It's they who win the games, make the plays etc.

I always think the players must like that a lot about him.
 
http://www.bengals.com/news/article...k-and-PB/ab0a5cb2-9695-4a74-a855-ec88e7ebd12d

BELICHICK AND P.B.: One of Patriots head coach Bill Belichick's favorite topics is the influence of Bengals founder Paul Brown, and during his media session here Tuesday he lit it up. The week of New England's 2004 win over the Bengals in Foxboro, Belichick regaled the Cincinnati media with facts and figures on Brown's life.



The connection begins with Belichick's godfather, Bill Edwards, a former P.B. player who also coached for him. When Brown came to run the Bengals, Belichick and his father, Navy assistant coach Steve Belichick made the trip to Wilmington College to visit training camp.


Then when Belichick became coach of the Browns in 1991, the year Brown died, he became good friends with Brown's Hall of Fame running back Jim Brown, a guy often at odds with the coach. But there was also apparently a lot of respect there.
"Jim and I talked a lot about Paul and his relationship with Paul and how Paul ran the team," Belichick said Tuesday. "It was remarkable to me how similar things were at that point in the '90s and things haven't really changed that much 15 years later from the '90s structurally. I'm talking about game plans and scouting reports and practice schedules all those kinds of things relative to the way Paul did them after the war.


"Film exchange and things like that, they weren't going on back then. I'm sure Paul took a lot of that information, developed the system that he did which is really the foundation of the West Coast offense. The West Coast offense is really the Ohio River offense. It's Paul and what he did in Cleveland and what he did in Cincinnati. That's the grandfather of all the West Coast teams. I think his influence in the coaching ranks from a coaching schedule and how to coach and all of that, he truly wrote the book on it. And Bill Walsh's book is really a follow-up on what Paul did. I'm sure a lot of what Bill learned was from what Paul did and it still applies today."



If BBs teaching, I'm listening :)
 
Beaglebay said:
http://www.bengals.com/news/article...k-and-PB/ab0a5cb2-9695-4a74-a855-ec88e7ebd12d

BELICHICK AND P.B.: One of Patriots head coach Bill Belichick's favorite topics is the influence of Bengals founder Paul Brown, and during his media session here Tuesday he lit it up. The week of New England's 2004 win over the Bengals in Foxboro, Belichick regaled the Cincinnati media with facts and figures on Brown's life.



The connection begins with Belichick's godfather, Bill Edwards, a former P.B. player who also coached for him. When Brown came to run the Bengals, Belichick and his father, Navy assistant coach Steve Belichick made the trip to Wilmington College to visit training camp.


Then when Belichick became coach of the Browns in 1991, the year Brown died, he became good friends with Brown's Hall of Fame running back Jim Brown, a guy often at odds with the coach. But there was also apparently a lot of respect there.
"Jim and I talked a lot about Paul and his relationship with Paul and how Paul ran the team," Belichick said Tuesday. "It was remarkable to me how similar things were at that point in the '90s and things haven't really changed that much 15 years later from the '90s structurally. I'm talking about game plans and scouting reports and practice schedules all those kinds of things relative to the way Paul did them after the war.


"Film exchange and things like that, they weren't going on back then. I'm sure Paul took a lot of that information, developed the system that he did which is really the foundation of the West Coast offense. The West Coast offense is really the Ohio River offense. It's Paul and what he did in Cleveland and what he did in Cincinnati. That's the grandfather of all the West Coast teams. I think his influence in the coaching ranks from a coaching schedule and how to coach and all of that, he truly wrote the book on it. And Bill Walsh's book is really a follow-up on what Paul did. I'm sure a lot of what Bill learned was from what Paul did and it still applies today."



If BBs teaching, I'm listening :)
Click to expand...

I love when you see a Mike Reiss piece starting with "Bill Belichick was in teaching mood at todays presser" You know you're in for a lesson about the development of special teams and how it's changed, or about the evolution of this scheme or that scheme etc.
 
Paul Brown will be the subject of Friday's edition of "A Football Life".

It's about friggin' time.
 
Sweet...

I think the debate about the "greatest coach of all time" comes down to two...


Brown and Belichick. That's it.


If I am going to round out the Mount Rushmore tho..... I'm adding Bill Walsh and hmmm... I guess Lombardi.
 
Number Cruncher said:
Sweet...

I think the debate about the "greatest coach of all time" comes down to two...


Brown and Belichick. That's it.


If I am going to round out the Mount Rushmore tho..... I'm adding Bill Walsh and hmmm... I guess Lombardi.
Click to expand...

Don Shula just got really grumpy.

Think he did a lil duty in his slacks.
 
Number Cruncher said:
Sweet...

I think the debate about the "greatest coach of all time" comes down to two...


Brown and Belichick. That's it.


If I am going to round out the Mount Rushmore tho..... I'm adding Bill Walsh and hmmm... I guess Lombardi.
Click to expand...

Joe Gibbs won 3 Super Bowls with 3 different QBs. I'll take him over Walsh.
 
Beaglebay said:
Paul Brown will be the subject of Friday's edition of "A Football Life".

It's about friggin' time.
Click to expand...

I know it's probably meaningless, but I hate that some self-promoting, narcissistic, team killing ass like TO got one before he did.
 
Number Cruncher said:
Sweet...

I think the debate about the "greatest coach of all time" comes down to two...

Brown and Belichick. That's it.

If I am going to round out the Mount Rushmore tho..... I'm adding Bill Walsh and hmmm... I guess Lombardi.
Click to expand...

That the mount Rushmore of NFL coaches. How can you say I guess Lombardi . The SB trophy named after him..
 
king of kings said:
That the mount Rushmore of NFL coaches. How can you say I guess Lombardi . The SB trophy named after him..
Click to expand...

The trophy got it's name following Lombardi's death from cancer in 1970. No one doubts he's one of the all-time greats, but if he hadn't died at that time, who knows what the trophy would be called today.
 
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