With hundreds of MLB and NFL pro athletes serving in WWII, when the war ended in 1945 there was a plethora of both baseball and football players. A group of wealthy investors started a league to compete with the NFL and called it the All American Football Conference (AAFC).
Paul Brown was an iconic coach from Ohio, the state football originated in and where it had immense popularity. Brown had won a state championship as a High School coach and then a national title with Ohio State. His brand of coaching was unique in a time when coaching was a seasonal endeavor, he worked at it full time. He was an innovator and would change the field of football coaching forever. He required his players to spend as much time in the classroom learning plays, reviewing films, and studying opponents, as they spent on the practice field. He demanded a smart and disciplined team. If you didn’t perform well in his classroom, you weren’t going to play in the game. Brown signed on with the new AAFC teams that out of respect for him was given his name, the Cleveland Browns.
Paul Brown was also the first coach that determined “football speed” by making his players sprint a unique distance, 40 yards, and that has become a standard which college and pro football players are judged by today.
In the NFL, in 1945 and 1946 the Cleveland Rams were the most successful team playing for the NFC Championship both years and winning it in 1946. Fearing they would be less popular than the new Browns team they took an offer to play in the largest and newest stadium in the country, the LA Coliseum. It is the first and only time a Championship team has moved out of their home city while being World Champs.
Well Paul Brown was a no nonsense coach who judged his players by their classroom and field performance. He had his former players from his championship teams tryout for the Browns and two African American players were standouts and made the team. When asked by the news writers about breaking the racial barrier, Coach Brown refused to discuss anything but what his team did on the field. As Jim Brown, the Hall of Fame running back said, “Coach Brown broke the color barrier in professional sports the way it should have been done. He did it and didn’t talk about it.” In fact, even today, it seems that nobody talks about it.
How can Jackie Robinson be so famous and the men who broke the pro-football barrier be unknown? I’ll leave that to your opinion, as I have my own. Legend has it that Brach Rickey heard of the 2 Browns: Paul Willis and Marion Motley, and that gave him the courage to promote Jackie Robinson to the Dodgers the following year.
The first Browns regular season game in Cleveland broke all Cleveland football attendance records with >70,000 fans in attendance. Estimates were as high as 1/3 of the gate were African Americans. Paul Brown went onto win 4 straight AAFC Championships before the Browns were merged into the NFL in 1950. Led by QB Otto Grahm and to the surprise of the NFL owners, the Browns won the NFL Championship in 1950. Willis Motley had stellar careers and are now in the NFL Hall of Fame.
My opinion is, like Jackie Robinson, they were singled out for abuse by many opposing players and fans and had to be model citizens to pave the way for all teams to allow for more diversity in the NFL. They are deserving of a statue somewhere in this country beside the HOF. Below is a couple of pictures of this great tandem.
