The Definitive History of the Cleveland Browns

I think loyalty is a wonderful thing, but blind loyalty? Blind loyalty is both a very stupid and dangerous thing.

This television character has his flaws, but this is very true about him and I like this quote.

I don’t really ask people for loyatly. I usually try to earn it. Then once I have, I expect it. I’m often disappointed. My advice is to only be loyal to those you think will be loyal to you. There is only one exception. If you bring a child into this world, you must always be loyal to them. If they act badly, it is your responsibility to do your honest best to make them act better.

Baseball is famous for being the :American Pastime,” but of course anyone paying attention knows that by now it has been football for at least 40 years.

Americans love capitalism. The prime tenet of capitalism is competition, and honest capitalists are in favor of busting up monopolies. All four of our major sports leagues are monopolies and people will tell you that this is essential due to the nature of the trade.

The Cleveland Browns actually were an example of someone trying to bust up a monopoly.

The NFL started in 1920. They did not want to let others into their monopoly so in 1944 the AAFC was formed and the Cleveland Browns were one of its initial teams.

Of course the NFL was not happy about this. No monopoly wants competition. It is the desire to end competition that is the reason that people form monopolies and that monopolies make so much money.

In fact, the owner of the Washington Redskins George Preston Marshall said what they all said,  “The worst team in our league could beat the best team in theirs.”

Most of the time that is true, except that when the Cleveland Browns started playing in the first AAFC season their coach and their namesake was this guy.

 

 

You must be pretty telented, if they name the team after you before their fist game.

For a while Cleveland’s baseball team was called the Naps, for Napoleon Lajoie, who already had proven himself to be really good by leading the American League in hitting in his first year playing for Cleveland. He also was somewhat loyal in that when the National League’s best manager John McGraw wanted to sign him, Lajoie said that he intended to stay in Cleveland. MLB was not yet MLB and not yet a monopoly although teams did own their players in large parts for a very long time due to something called the “reserve clause,” which is why when Lajoie joined the Cleveland team he wasn’t allowed to play for them in Pennsylvania.

You see Lajoie wasn’t that loyal to the Phillies, because he signed with the new American League Philadelphia team, the Athletics. When this went to court, the Phillies sort of won, because Lajoie could play in the American League if he wanted, but not in Pennsylvania. Lajoie was an amazing player, but not good enough to pay to never play a single home game, which is how he wound up in Cleveland.

By 1915 Lajoie’s skills had eroded and he did want to leave Cleveland and was sold back to Philadelphia. That made it hard for Cleveland’s team to be called the Naps anymore so they became the Indians.

Napoleon Lajoie is considered to be easily among the top five Cleveland Indians of all time. His uniform number is not retired because no one wore numbers until the Indians started to do so in 1916. There is to my knowledge no type of tribute to Lajoie by the Indians, which I guess isn’t that big of a deal because Lajoie never actually was an Indian.

Sometimes, monopolies are busted up by the government.  Often though, monopolies are busted up by stone cold geniuses and Paul Brown was a stone cold genius. Then again some stone cold geniuses like Jeff Bezo’s kick ass like Paul Brown did and wind up with virtual monopolies that put all the other competitive businesses out of business. I don’t know. Read Ayn Rand if you want to, because I don’t.

The AAFC also had owners with money maybe even more money than the NFL owners. The Browns owner Mickey McBride had a lot of money from real estate and taxis.

All of this was sort of insane because football was not at that time the “National Pastime,” and the NFL probably wasn’t making any money even though it may have been a monopoly. You can have a monopoly on cigarette butts but if no one wants to buy cigarette butts, even having a monopoly on them won’t make you any money. I have plenty of cigarette butts please don’t send me yours.

Cleveland did have a football team, the Rams, they won the 1945 title, but never made any money. Their owner had a brain. He wanted to move to Los Angeles. The NFL told him that he couldn’t. Their owner, Dan Reeves threatened to join the AAFC and the NFL  caved and let him move to Los Angeles.

When they did start playing, Paul Brown’s team won their first game 44-0 in front of more than 60,000 people at the cavernous Cleveland Municipal, which was always a much better place to watch football than baseball. I know because I watched both sports there.

Paul Brown was a pure football genius in many ways, he innovated a lot of stuff, but he also did what anyone with a brain should have at the time and signed two guys, Marion Motley and Bill Willis, who would go on to make the Hall of Fame. Signing a Hall of Famer is never a bad idea unless they are past their prime and neither of those guys were. They were however black making them the first black professional football players since 1933.

Anyone with a brain, and clearly Paul Brown had one, knew that there were great black athletes. Bill Veeck had a brain and wanted to buy the Philadelphia Phillies and sign all the best black baseball players, which would have made the Philadelphia Phillies more successful than the New York Yankees. MLB got wind of Veeck’s plan and blocked him.

What Veeck should have done was start his own league and comepete against MLB, but Bill Veeck never really had much money, which is why he was prone to all kinds of crowd drawing stunts when they finally did let him buy a MLB baseball team in 1946. By that point Branch Rickey had Jackie Robinson playing in Montreal so it was too late for Veeck to get a monopoly on black baseball talent, but he did soon sign Larry Doby right after Jackie Robinson integrated baseball. If anyone ever sort of had a monopoly on black baseball players after that it was Rickey’s Dodger’s, who suddenly went from the laughing stock of baseball to perrenial contenders.

When Brown first suggested to Willis that he wanted to sign him, Willis was sceptical, and Brown assured him that he was good enough to make the team, and told him he would stake his reputation on that fact.

This was not much of a gamble on Brown’s part, because he had coached Willis at Ohio State. When Willis did start playing he sacked so many quarterbacks that people started to complain that he was jumping offside, which he wasn’t. He was just that good, which Paul Brown clearly knew at the time.

Marion Motley? Look him up. He was Marion fucking Motley!

 

The quarterback Willis kept sacking? They got this guy instead.

 

That guy is also a Hall of Famer and the best football player in the history of my alma mater, Northwestern University. That wasn’t a tough thing to be when I went there because when I went there the students who did go to the games did so to throw Marshmallows at each other. When my alma mater decided to take football seriously, they put up signs saying, “The throwing of marshmallows is expressly prohibited.”

They did not have their famous helmets at that time, but they did have in some fashion this mascot.

I guess that “Brownie” fits in with the team name, but it is all kinds of weird to me as a mascot. I would pick something fearsome, an elf does not seem fearsome. but if you have Marion Motley playing for you maybe you are already fearsome enough and do not need an imposing mascot and can settle for something cute enough for little kids to cherish.

Now due to Paul Brown’s genius what Marshall said was not true. Not only could the Browns beat the worst team in the NFL they were likely better than any team in the NFL.

This was very good for the Cleveland Browns, but it wasn’t a very good way to bust up a monopoly because the Cleveland Browns monopolized the AAFC by winning its championship every year that it existed.

The Browns at some point might have made some money, but this type of fighting over a relatively unpopular sport is not a good way to make money. Both leagues and almost all of the teams lost money.

This of course leads to negotiations, which happened in 1948. The NFL was willing to take the Browns and the San Francisco 49’ers, this was not good enough for the AAFC who wanted four NFL franchises so the battle continued.

Those two AAFC teams had been very good in 1948. They were so good that the 49’ers only lost twice both times to the Browns. The Browns went 14-0. In their three years, Paul Brown’s team had only lost three games and been tied once.

Those two teams did not play in the championship. The Browns beat the 7-7 Buffalo Bills in the championship. Nine of the leagues 26 All-Pro selections were Browns. It would have been more dominant than that because All-Pro’s were both first teamers and second teamers. Most of the Brown All-Pros were first teamers.

Divisional nonsense couldn’t ruin the AAFC championship in 1949, because in that year they only had one division and only 7 teams. The Brown did beat the 49’ers in that years championship.

By that point, their record was 52-4-3 and they had four championships. They also had their first official Coach of the Year award. I don’t know how that vote went down, but I can’t see it as having been a very dramatic battle. It was won by Paul Brown.

After that three AFC teams joined the new league which sort of had a joint name for a short time, but really it was just the NFL. Of course the Browns and 49’ers made it. The other team that made it was the Baltimore Colts, who had just gone 1-11. This of course happened because of money. Everything is about money.

The NFL’s monopoly would be challenged by the AFL in the 60’s and that led to a merger.

It would be challenged again in the ’80s by the USFL. The USFL sort of had a sane plan to play in the fall and not to pay players too much.

Donald Trump, who wanted an NFL team, but could not get one, bought into the USFL at some point and almost unilaterally destroyed that plan by paying players too much and convincing the other owners to play in the fall directly against the NFL. Trump mostly did that to try to get into the NFL by forcing a merger. That did not work.

This led to a latch ditch hail mary lawsuit against the NFL by the USFL accusing the NFL of being an illegal monopoly. The USFL won!

Sadly, mostly for Donald Trump, the USFL was such a silly ploy by Trump to get an NFL team that the jury only awarded them a dollar which was trebled. This was substancially less than the $1.2 billion they were trying to get.

The USFL did get their attorney fees paid and eventually with interest a check was written by the NFL for $3.76 to the USFL, which has yet to be cashed.

This is all chronicled in some fashion in Donald Trump’s classic book, “The Art of the Deal,” where he will tell you how the demise of the USFL was every other owner’s fault but his.

He lost $22 million basically trying to get an NFL team on the cheap. Had he just paid the going rate, it would have been the most incredible investment of his life, because basically once the Cleveland Browns joined the NFL, the NFL started kicking major ass.

It did work out well for Steve Young. He signed a ten year contract with the Los Angeles USFL franchise for $40 million, which they could not afford. He only played two years in the USFL, but the way they worked his deal he’s still getting paid. He will still be getting paid until 2027 when he will get more than $3 million. He also got paid by the NFL for fifteen seasons. He wrote a book in 2016, but the title of the book he should have written had already been used by the guy who won the presidential election that year.