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leveland native and Hollywood actress Patricia Heaton of Everybody Loves Raymond and The Middle once told a joke about pro football coach Paul Brown: “A football player died and went to heaven. He saw a football game in progress and on the sidelines, a man in a tie, coat, and fedora hat watching intently. The football player asked St. Peter, ‘Is that Paul Brown?’ St. Peter responded, ‘No, that’s just God pretending to be Paul Brown.’” The joke slyly illustrates the enormous impact and legacy Paul Brown had on the game of football. Pre-Brown, it was characterized mostly by brute force, with little intellectual finesse. Brown’s genius for innovation transformed it into the mental and analytical game that it is today.
PA U L B R O W N
gridiron great Remembering the man who revolutionized the game of pro football. BY ALICIA ADAMS; PHOTOS COURTESY OF PRO FOOTBALL HALL OF FAME
This year marks the 30th anniversary of Paul Brown’s death, and his innovations continue to touch almost every aspect of the modern-day sport. “Paul Brown was the pioneer of coaching the game of football as a science,” says former Ohio State University head coach Jim Tressell, now president of Youngstown State University. “Data analytics, meticulous practice planning, playbooks, use of film to study performance — Paul Brown made all of those a part of every coach’s repertoire. It was our study of Paul Brown’s 1942 national champions that gave us the blueprint to become the 2002 national champions.” John Collins, a member of the Professional Football Researchers Association, takes that a step further: “In my opinion, Paul Brown is one of the greatest football coaches that ever lived, if not the greatest.” Brown was born in Norwalk in 1908, but grew up in Massillon, where high school football is inextricably woven into the fabric of the history and culture. As the quarterback for Washington High for two years, he led the Tigers to a 15-3 record. He enrolled at Ohio State, but
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