NFL 95: A History of Pro Football in 95 Objects

Rams and Gators · May 21, 2014

Love these, having only really gotten into the NFL in the early 2000s I'm not as knowledgeable of the history as some of you guys so these are great.

Prime Time · May 28, 2014

Bill Walsh’s Coaching Tapes: An Enduring Genius
By Greg A. Bedard

Editor’s note: This is the third in The MMQB’s 10-part series NFL 95: A History of Pro Football in 95 Objects, commemorating the 95th season of the NFL in 2014. Each Wednesday through the start of training camp in July, The MMQB will unveil one long-form piece on an artifact of particular significance to the history of the NFL, accompanied by other objects that trace the rise of professional football in America, from the NFL’s founding in a Hupmobile dealership in Canton in 1920 to its place today at the forefront of American sports and popular culture.

SANTA CLARA, Calif.—There he stands, exactly how you picture him in your mind. Tanned, fit, flowing white hair. His dress switches from the normal Sunday attire—white sweater over a collared golf shirt, neatly pressed slacks—to trim T-shirt tucked into red coaching shorts. The tone of his voice, measured, passionate and, above all else, professorial, is as comforting as a well-worn pair of slippers.

Your initial impression is that you’re watching a ghost, considering he’s been gone nearly seven years now. But his presence is so strong, in the building, in the coaching staffs around the NFL, in the offensive and team management concepts still being employed, and, especially, on the screen in front of you, that you’re certain the vision of former 49ers coach Bill Walsh is no apparition.

Walsh most certainly lives on, and will for many years. The excellence sustained by his 49ers teams—92-59-1 in the regular season, a .714 postseason winning percentage, three Super Bowl titles in six years and a fourth by protégé George Seifert the season after Walsh retired—is reason enough. But so are the videotapes he left behind.

Walsh filmed nearly all of his meetings and practices during his tenure with the Niners, from 1979 to ’88. Many are in the possession of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, which sent back copies to the franchise soon after Jim Harbaugh was named coach and requested they be returned in 2011. Several are missing, believed to have landed in the secret stashes of assistants connected to Walsh and the 49ers over the years.

The list of coaches who worked directly under Walsh or occupy a prominent perch on his coaching tree is long and distinguished: Seifert, Paul Hackett, Marty Mornhinweg, Andy Reid, Bill Callahan, Sam Wyche, Steve Mariucci, Mike Holmgren, Mike Shanahan, Mike McCarthy, and the names continue. Shanahan, the story goes, learned the West Coast offense just from watching the Walsh tapes. Harbaugh’s staff spent the 2011 lockout studying the films.

Now you’re sitting in front of them in the Bill Walsh Room at the 49ers’ training facility. On the wall hangs a picture of Walsh, lying on an equipment bag on the locker room floor before a game, hands behind his head, legs crossed. He’s the image of calm before the raging storm that is professional football. Yes, Walsh lives on.

PRECISION

“It’s that simple.” (Michael Zagaris/Sports Illustrated)

Several factors regarding Walsh’s strategy, coaching style and overall philosolphy stand out after you watch hours of the Walsh tapes. The first factor is precision. Every movement on the field was choreographed by Walsh, to the point where he detailed even the placement and positioning of the blockers’ heads on individual plays.

The following is just part of Walsh’s explanation of a run play called “18 Power,” recorded during a meeting before the 1984 season opener against the Lions. Keep in mind, the play has already been installed. This is review.

What we want here is a 1/2 to 2-yard split right here with the flanker. With our flanker blocking down, his head on the upfield side, with our tight end blocking straight out, right down the middle [of the opponent], make sure your head is slightly on the inside. Go straight out and hit this guy with your hat just on the inside, knock him straight back. The two of you take this guy for a ride. Once you feel like you’ve got him turned, then our flanker can slip off and pick off the [middle] backer, just like we’ve drawn it.

Now the critical part on 18 Power is the tackle’s block. He’s blocking by himself, and the ball has to get all the way over here. So it’s your job not to try and turn the guy, try to knock him straight back, your hat slightly on the outside. You have to account for him going down inside on you, and if we can find a way to read it a little better, we’ll do it. But that’s the critical block that we have to sustain.

We can’t try to do anything with it because he can come around [the block] very easily. So sustaining the block is critical, not doing anything else. The guy can’t go anywhere. If he goes outside, you sustain the block and he goes right into the double team. Now our guard will naturally double and then rub on the W [weakside] backer. Get a good part of this guy and then be ready to pick him off.

Got that? There’s more, just in the blocking instructions:

We seal back side, our guard is going to pull, but as you pull just run a full-speed course around the flanker’s block and then look back up. Remember, [look] 70 percent inside, 30 percent outside. But, again, if this M [middle backer] is scraping through here, you want to try to cut him down rather than stand up and block him. Because what happens is if you stand up and hit him, you’re sort of bounced back right into the hole. So you want to run full speed, alert for the M as you come by. That’s the critical part of it.

Our fullback goes inside out and runs a power block now on a strong safety. Your course is just inside through the strong safety. I’d say you go for about two feet outside the TE position, splitting the difference. If he comes inside of you, it will all get pinned. If he’s outside of you, you kick him straight out. If he crosses the line you turn him out. But you keep that power block like you do on any speed backer. Block him, knock him straight back or turn him out.

But the difference now, here fullback, is you cannot just unload because this guy is much quicker on his feet than one of these guys would be. He can actually make you miss by just dodging. So you really have to keep your feet up underneath you. Get him more standing up or flush down the middle. Because if you don’t stand up and block him, he’ll dodge you. He’s a good enough athlete out there. You have to be careful. It’s always possible, halfback, as we double team and sort of move a little bit, our pulling guard fills in and then you guys both turn up inside the double team. But most likely, it’s just like we have it drawn. Stretch it and break it.”

Sounds complicated, but there is a simplicity in the way Walsh explains plays on these tapes. There is little doubt that the best football coaches share the gift of making the complicated simple for the players. Walsh has that ability to make every player feel comfortable with his assignment so that it fits together perfectly with the whole. And he often punctuates each explanation with a three-word phrase to drive home the point: “It’s that simple.”

Walsh and his offensive line coach, the late Bob McKittrick, constantly harped on a players’ “course,” the direction and speed of his running or blocking on any given play. They wanted every player’s movement to match up precisely with the other 10 men on the field and with the play. Some plays called for a slow course. Others fast. Timing in football, Walsh latered explained, was critical.

The need for precision extended beyond the players’ assignments on the field. It was an essential part of the coaches’ play-calling as well. Walsh thought so far ahead that he’d tell quarterback Joe Montana a certain play would only be run on second down, because there was a reasonable chance Montana would have to throw the ball away. Walsh didn’t want that to happen on third down.

“He put more value on your knowing where you had to be, because I don’t care what kind of talent you are, you’re going to mess up everybody else if you’re not in the exact right spot,” three-time All Pro guard Guy McIntyre, a rookie in ’84, said while reviewing some Walsh tapes. “His point was to make sure that everybody, not just himself but every coach, had the ability to teach to the finest little details that would make a difference in a game. You can hear how he talks about throwing the ball. It’s got to be here, not there, not too early, not too late, it has to be in this window. It has to be precise. That’s taught now, but it wasn’t back then. He teaches perfection without saying it.”

CONFIDENCE

Walsh with Joe Montana in the NFC Championship Game against the Bears, January 1985. (Richard Mackson/Sports Illustrated)

The Bill Walsh on these tapes speaks with extreme assurance, especially on the final Friday meeting before a game. There is never any doubt in his voice.

“The linebacker will be here so you should look for the ball here.”

“This play looks especially good to us.”

“98 Boss, hell of a play.”

“This looks good too because now they have a corner that’s supporting. Very very well done. Should be a good play for us.”

“If they’re in Cover 9, this short-yardage pass Halfback 2 Flanker Snake might go 95 yards. We go ahead in ‘U’ formation, we’re backed up and they’re in [Cover] 9, we’re going to beat them. We’ve got it right down the middle for the touchdown.”

Other coaches might feel that ruling by fear is the best course of action. Walsh obviously felt that a confident ball club was the best club.

INTIMACY

The recordings show Walsh’s easy manner in the locker room and a clear concern for his players’ well-being on and off the field. (Michael Zagaris/Sports Illustrated)

The Walsh tapes don’t address just X’s and O’s. He may have played the part of a professor, but it was his ability to relate to the players that had them behind him at all times. He often included himself in his discussions, to project an “us against them” unity as well. Here he is offering instruction to players on dealing with the media.

Every year you’re going to have a calculated approach taken by a couple writers, especially when you’re doing well, to take the team apart. And they delight in it. They like to see you squirm, they like to see all of us squirm. If they could feel they affected us and we didn’t do well, they have won the war. It’s that simple. I guess we’re fortunate we don’t have more of them. If were in New York City or some place it would be eight or 10 of them doing this. But every year, the same guy locally, there’s a couple of them, will do anything they can to disrupt us.

They can make it black and white, defense versus offense, coaches versus players, owners versus coach. They’ll do it every conceivable way, and they’ll get a formula and a plan and methodically work on it. And they work on it. They really calculate it. These guys are not simple-minded people. They’re very bright guys. Just find a way to deal with this stuff, because it will happen. We’ll have two or three things come up, we don’t even know what they are yet, but he’ll come up with something to try to break us. And nobody’s going to break us. Nobody’s going to take us apart.”

While the physical well-being of players has become a prime concern in recent years, it already was for Walsh and his 49ers three decades ago. Eight former players recently filed a lawsuit against the league, alleging that team medical staffers did whatever they could to keep players out on the field, with little concern for the health implications. Compare those assertions with this talk Walsh had with his players, and it’s hard not see why he was so loved by most of his former players.

One of our primary responsibilities is your safety on the field, and then your treatment off the field. If anybody suspects that part of it, you certainly should approach me personally because our main responsibility in coaching a game like this is your personal safety. I just want to remind you of that. I think we have the best team physician in football, best orthopedic man and best practice because he has a staff that works with him.

One of the best trainers. It’s true from our owners and the rest of the organization—your safety and your well-being is most important. We’ve made one or two mistakes putting people back in the game that were injured, happened once last year, but it rarely gets by. It rarely does. I couldn’t live it with it if in any way I took a chance with any of your well-being.

Walsh also expressed concern for his players’ financial well-being, giving several lectures on how they could make their money last.

If there are five guys in this room that made money on investments, I want to see them after and get their names and get involved myself. I’ve made the same mistakes. I’ve lost. [Team president] John McVay and I are in a deal right now—we can sell you some land across town. You name it, it’s yours. Just start making the payments on it. We were going to develop it into a shopping center, only problem is no one lives over there.

Sprinkling humor was important to Walsh. When he organized a team fishing tournament, he made fun of the “city fellas” who had probably never seen a fishing pole before. Walsh jokingly tried to get some players to work out after a game and asked who was going to wear their Speedos. Before a divisional playoff game against the Bears, one 49er made a wisecrack in the back of the room, and Walsh asked if that was Jim McMahon. The humor never feels forced or falls flat. For all his reputation as an intellectual and an introvert, Walsh obviously walked easily among different groups.

BIG MOMENTS

Walsh and then-assistant Sam Wyche (far rtleft), one of the many disciples who would go on to spread the gospel in the ensuing decades. The two would face off in Super Bowl XXIII. (Carl Iwasaki/Sports Illustrated)

A tape from the middle of the ’84 season shows Walsh at his best. The 5-0 49ers were set to collide on Monday night in the Meadowlands against the 3-2 Giants of Bill Parcells, Lawrence Taylor and Phil Simms. Walsh set the scene like a virtuoso conductor:

New York City has got that air about it. It’s a crazy place, but it’s really the mecca of the whole country. Whether you’re an athletic team or an entertainer, actor, musician, whatever—performing in New York City, one of the best places, is the ultimate. Now we’re going in there as an undefeated football team, and this is where your performance is looked at by everybody. As you guys know, the critics in the country generally start there. Everybody looks at you from there. And the pressure is on you when you go there and perform. The pressure’s on.

There’s been a lot of hyped up athletes and musicians have gone there and failed and have been staggered out of town. A lot have gone there in the last 200 years and not made it, been embarrassed and were never asked back. We’ll be asked back, it’s on the schedule someday. The point is, we go in with a lot of pride and we go in with a lot of accomplishment, and they now test us in New York City. This is not Duluth or Albuquerque. This is the Big Apple. This is the mecca of the United States, or the world. There are critics, the fans there are the most active and most critical.

Now there’s all kinds of way to go there as a football team. One of them is just to be a great performing team that goes into New York City and methodically destroys their finest. Go in there and destroy their finest and leave town. You’ll know that you went to NYC and did it. It’s that simple. That’s the challenge. The other way to do it is to go in there flat, go in there distracted because the plane flies over you see these tall buildings, there’s a little action in town. You go in there and do that and you’ll make a goddamn fool of yourself and fall on your face. It generally goes either way.

It’s my job and the coaches’ job and the leaders of the team to make sure we go in there as champions and dismantle this New York Giant football team and leave town knowing that we did it in New York City. It’s that simple. I’ve been through it. A lot of you have. But now we’re going in there as, maybe, a great football team. Who knows? Maybe we’re great. And they’re going to recall what they saw of us. If we’re going to be great, this the place to be great, New York City.

In his game-planning, Walsh didn’t let on one bit that Taylor and the other great members of that defense—Leonard Marshall, Carl Banks, Jim Burt, Harry Carson, Super Bowl champions two years later—would be a formidable opponent.

If they blitz them, they’re good, but hell we’ve blocked them before. You go inside out. We’ll pick [Taylor] up with our guard.

This team’s pass rush is fair to average. Not great. So if Taylor is blocked, we’re in pretty decent shape with the other people.

Final score: 49ers 31, Giants 10. A tape from the following Tuesday:

We did a hell of a job the other night, did what we talked about doing at the start of the week. So that’s one project completed. Can’t say we didn’t go back there and play a great game. The next one, of course, is the Steelers. They have a history of putting people out of the game. The Bengals game, they put eight guys out. These guys are a damn tough opponent.”

The 49ers fell to the Steelers at home, 20-17 in a game with several controversial calls. It would be a lesson learned for the Walsh and the 49ers. From a team meeting after the game:

We got beat to the punch, something we strive for. The other team was beating us to the punch. We took a beating. Our defense was not there by six inches on virtually every play. Our support, everything else. You look at the film, and you’ll see most guys played that way. Can’t tell you exactly why. Offensively it was much the same way. We had critical plays that weren’t executed. We have to remind ourselves that every play is a critical one and they were all involved, 49 guys.

So they have a great team, we haven’t lost anything in the standpoint of our future and in this competitive league you have to give credit to the opponent. We’ll give it to them. But the next time we take the field, men, I don’t care which team it is, we have this taste in our mouth one too many times. I don’t want to suffer through this any more than you do. I don’t want that sick feeling of losing a game that you should have won or could have won. That sickening, lousy feeling. You know how it is. It’s no fun.

So the next time we go out there, the Houston Oilers are going to have to take the wrath of what we have to give out. Whether they like it or not, they’re going to have to take it. And we have to go into that game feeling that way. That’s the only way to get this out of your system, and that’s to knock the hell out of somebody as soon as you can.

That Sunday at Houston the 49ers built a 20-7 lead and went on to win 34-21. San Francisco would not lose another game that season, going 18-1 and beating the Dolphins 38-16 in Super Bowl XIX.

Fast forward to July 1985, and the reigning Super Bowl champions were at the start of training camp. It was time to forget about what the 49ers had accomplished the previous, and to do it all over again. Walsh went back to where it all starts: the team.

What in the hell difference is there [among NFL teams]. There are some with the same athletic ability, unfortunately for us, but that’s the case. We take pride in our great quarterbacks, there are great ones around the league. The critical difference has to be how we play as a unit, how we work together. That’s the difference between us and everyone else. Some teams are much better at it, some will be at the bottom every year because they don’t play well as a unit. They don’t have the same respect, dignity related to each other. They don’t have that. They don’t communicate. They don’t work well together.

The chemistry is the critical part of it, and it doesn’t show up initially in any given game. Every time you take the field the chemistry part of it shows late in the game. So you have to remind yourself, it’s not our athletic ability that’s going to knock the jocks off these guys. It’s how we play as a team, how we’re made up, the confidence we have in each other, and just how effectively we work as a defensive unit. That’s the difference too. That’s basically the difference in our ball club, and it was last season. We’re just better put together than the goddamn L.A. Rams. It’s that simple. I know they all want to win and beat us, but goddammit they can’t do it because we play better as a unit than they do. It’s just one of those things. And that’s the part we have to keep.

THE LEGACY

Frank Gore’s Super Bowl XLVII touchdown was a classic Walsh play with modern pre-snap dressing. (John W. McDonough/Sports Illustrated)

February 2013. Super Bowl XLVII in New Orleans. With 5:05 remaining in the third quarter, Jim Harbaugh’s 49ers have first and goal at the Baltimore 6-yard line, trailing the Ravens 28-13. The dressing on the play—a shift from Colin Kaepernick under center and tight ends Vernon Davis and Delanie Walker on the right, to the shotgun and double tight ends left—is new-school, but the play designed by Walsh disciples Harbaugh and offensive coordinator Greg Roman is straight out of Walsh’s playbook: old-school counter play off of sprint-out action.

Kaepernick looks as if he’s going to sprint left for a pass, and running back Frank Gore sells it momentarily by faking a block. But left guard Mike Iupati is pulling along with Walker from the left to the right. Iupati turns Ravens outside linebacker Terrell Suggs to the inside, Walker cuts down safety Ed Reed, and receiver Randy Moss holds off cornerback Corey Graham to the inside just long enough for Gore to score untouched.

“It’s dressed up with a bell and whistle there, but that was old vintage 49ers stuff right there,” said Roman, who studied the Walsh tapes as an assistant under Seifert in Carolina, and with the 49ers.

“I think the ties are stronger than ever to what Walsh taught and believed in. Much of what we see now in college and pro football are extended handoffs, the high-percentage short and quick passing, because Bill passed the ball to set up the run most of the time, and the principles of how to attack space and isolate defenders, you see a lot of that. And that was Bill Walsh.”

So Walsh lives on. He does so through his accomplishments, through his book Finding the Winning Edge and, for those who have had a chance to watch these tapes from his 49ers days, through these recordings. Like grainy footage and audio of Vince Lombardi, they are perpetual gifts that link football past and the future. Through Walsh we can see the teachings of his mentors, such as Sid Gilman and, of course, Paul Brown. And through his many protégés—the long and branching line of his coaching tree—we can see Walsh. You don’t have to those coaching these tapes to see his influence. It’s evident in any game you watch today.

No, the Bill Walsh on these tapes is no ghost.

Boffo97 · May 28, 2014

I can think of some tapes that would be even more important to the NFL legacy, but those were destroyed at the expense of the actual integrity of the NFL to protect its perceived legacy.

Not that I'm bitter or anything.

Mojo Ram · May 28, 2014

Bill Walsh coaching tree

http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/page...greatest-nfl-coaches-bill-walsh-coaching-tree

Boffo97 · May 28, 2014

So that was Linehan's problem. Nothing that comes from Bill Walsh will ever be good for the Rams. Ever.

LesBaker · May 28, 2014

Bill Belichik Coaching Tree:

Prime Time · May 28, 2014

Madden Video Game

The MMQB presents NFL 95, a special project—unveiled every Wednesday from May through July—detailing 95 artifacts that tell the story of the NFL, as the league prepares to enter its 95th season. See the entire series here.

The Madden football franchise, now approaching its 30th anniversary, almost wasn’tMadden at all.

When the game that would be called Madden was taking shape under EA Sports in the late 1980s for use on the Apple II home computer, EA founder Trip Hawkins saw the former Oakland Raiders head coach, broadcaster and robust pitchman as a third choice. The top pick was 49ers quarterback Joe Montana, at the height of his powers at the time and Hawkins’ boyhood idol growing up in Southern California. But Montana already had a deal with another famous video game maker, Atari. The second choice, Cal football coach Joe Kapp, wanted royalties on the title. So Hawkins went with Madden, and both were in for a crash course; Madden in the power and promise of technology and Hawkins in the game of football.

Madden insisted that if he was putting his name on it the game had to be 11-on-11, a major challenge considering the lack of computing power in late ’80s. As gaming consoles evolved Madden grew more realistic through the ’90s, with NFL teams and logos, and later player names (with the NFLPA’s blessing) becoming part of the game. With realistic playbooks and real-time roster updates, gamers playing current versions often feel like they’re a hoodie away from being the next Bill Belichick.

Through a partnership with the NFL, the franchise eventually brought to intersect jock culture and gaming, no small feat in the pop-culture climate of the early ’90s. Today, each new version of Madden invariably sells a million copies in its first week on the shelves.

— Robert Klemko

Pro Football Hall of Fame

Dallas Cowboys’ Cheerleaders Uniform

The MMQB presents NFL 95, a special project—unveiled every Wednesday from May through July—detailing 95 artifacts that tell the story of the NFL, as the league prepares to enter its 95th season. See the entire series here.

So established are the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders that even Jerry Jones couldn’t ruin them. Longtime Cowboys fans may remember a four-day offseason spat in June 1989 in which 14 cheerleaders quit when informed of new owner Jones’ plans to trim the cheerleaders’ uniforms and relax policies against fraternizing with team employees and promoting alcohol. The public outcry that ensued forced Jones to back off any changes to ex-general manager Tex Schramm’s brainchild.

In 1972, Schramm, the man who put the star on the Cowboys’ helmets, scrapped the high school boys and girls who cheered games in sweaters and long skirts and pants in favor of a handpicked dance team dressed in high-cut shorts and bare midriffs. They were going for a sexy-but-wholesome aesthetic, hiring young professional women and governing them with strict rules. The uniforms and the rules would remain largely the same, with the rest of the NFL taking note and modeling their cheerleaders after Schramm’s.

The team faced criticism from feminists who noted the most prominent females in sports were scantily-clad side acts. But America embraced the new look, and the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders became a cultural phenomenon—with their own posters, calendars, “Making of . . . ” shows and even a full-length 1979 made-for-TV movie (watch the whole thing below!) starring Bert Convy and Lauren (“Love Boat”) Tewes.

For better or worse, the cheerleading tradition has persevered in the NFL. In 2013, 26 six teams had official cheerleading squads—only the Bears, Browns, Giants, Lions, Packers, Steelers did not. Those six may be joined next season by the Bills: Their squad, the Jills, suspended operations after five cheerleaders filed a lawsuit over compensation, and what the plaintiffs call degrading treatment.

— Robert Klemko

Boffo97 · May 28, 2014

Mention of early Madden games compels me to post this:

Mojo Ram · May 28, 2014

Boffo97 said:
Mention of early Madden games compels me to post this:

I always Lol'd at the ambulance running over players to get to the wounded man.
I used to play that shit all night long.

Prime Time · May 28, 2014

David N. Berkwitz/Sports Illustrated

Super Bowl Rings

The MMQB presents NFL 95, a special project—unveiled every Wednesday from May through July—detailing 95 artifacts that tell the story of the NFL, as the league prepares to enter its 95th season. See the entire series here.

Franchises play for and receive the Vince Lombardi Trophy for winning football’s ultimate prize: a Super Bowl title. But since only one trophy is given to each champion, rings are given out to the players, coaches and other staff members. After the 1966 season, Lombardi himself designed the very first one with Jostens, which has created 31 of the 48 Super Bowl rings. The first one had just one diamond, was made of gold and was valued at $750. Inscribed on the inside were three important words to Lombardi’s Packers: harmony, courage and valor.

For winning Super Bowl XLVII after the 2012 season, the Ravens received rings that included 243 round-cut diamonds in each white and yellow gold design. The value of each ring was estimated between $5,000 and $10,000. The NFL pays $5,000 toward 150 rings; the rest of the bill is footed by the club. “You had a chance to hold the Lombardi, and now you get the rings and you realize that you’ve done it,” said Ravens receiver Torrey Smith. “It’s definitely a special moment.”

— Greg A. Bedard

Pro Football Hall of Fame

Tom Matte’s Playbook Wristband

The MMQB presents NFL 95, a special project—unveiled every Wednesday from May through July—detailing 95 artifacts that tell the story of the NFL, as the league prepares to enter its 95th season. See the entire series here.

Part of Don Shula’s success was adapting to each quarterback he coached—including the running back he was forced to play at quarterback.

Shula’s 1965 Baltimore Colts improbably lost both starting quarterback Johnny Unitas and back-up Gary Cuozzo right before the climax of their season. For the regular-season finale, and the Western Conference playoff, Shula turned to a running back who had never been a signal caller in the pros: Tom Matte. Scrambling, Shula simplified the offense and gave Matte a makeshift plastic wristband with the Colts’ plays scrawled on a card underneath. Matte would have led his team to the NFL Championship Game that season were it not for a controversial fourth-quarter field goal by the Green Bay Packers—it appeared to sail wide of the upright—that gave Vince Lombardi’s squad the opportunity to win the conference playoff in overtime.

Matte returned to his preferred position of running back for the rest of his 12-year career, but in his brief three-game stint as an NFL quarterback, he turned out to be a trailblazer. The wristband, a novelty when Matte wore it, is a common practice among full-time quarterbacks today.

— Jenny Vrentas

Getty Images

The Hupmobile

The MMQB presents NFL 95, a special project—unveiled every Wednesday from May through July—detailing 95 artifacts that tell the story of the NFL, as the league prepares to enter its 95th season. See the entire series here.

Ralph Hay was a successful automobile dealer, but his showroom’s place in history far exceeds that of the Hupmobiles he sold. Pro football had existed since 1892 but lacked any real order during its first three decades. A pair of meetings in August and September 1920, in Hay’s showroom in Canton, Ohio, changed that: The American Professional Football Association, renamed the NFL two years later, was organized.

As the story goes, the founding fathers—including Hay, owner of the Canton Bulldogs, and George Halas, representing the Decatur Staleys—sat on the cars’ running boards and drank buckets of beer while devising the league that would become the crown jewel of American sports. Jim Thorpe was elected president, a $100 membership fee was set, and play began within a few weeks. Fourteen teams played that first season, only two of which still exist today: the Staleys, now the Chicago Bears, and the Chicago Cardinals, now in Arizona.

Hay’s Hupmobile showroom has long since been torn down, but at the site in downtown Canton (now the Frank T. Bow Federal Building) you can find a plaque identifying the hallowed ground as the birthplace of the NFL.

— Jenny Vrentas

John DePetro/The MMQB

Baltimore Colts’ Marching Band Drum

The MMQB presents NFL 95, a special project—unveiled every Wednesday from May through July—detailing 95 artifacts that tell the story of the NFL, as the league prepares to enter its 95th season. See the entire series here.

Since 1947, when it first represented a team in the All-America Football Conference, the Baltimore Colts’ Marching Band has played continuously, whether its city had a football team or not. In that way, the band represents the undying passion of a city for its team, and represents the hopes of jilted fans everywhere that someday football will return.

The Colts franchise was canceled by the NFL in 1950 but resurrected three years later, when the Dallas Texans and their blue-and-white colors were transferred to Charm City. In between, the band played on. For the next 30 years the Colts thrived, winning four NFL championships during an era that featured quarterback Johnny Unitas and head coach Don Shula. But in 1984, after a dispute over building a stadium, the Irsay family packed up overnight and moved the franchise to Indianapolis in Mayflower moving trucks. Again, the band played on, this time as the symbol of a devastated city. The band practiced regularly over the next 11 years, performing at NFL and CFL halftime shows and at the 1991 Pro Football Hall of Fame enshrinement. Like the band, Baltimore never let the Colts go, and the musical ambassadors joined the city’s fight to bring pro football back.

In 1996, the city was part of another controversial team move—this time, when the Cleveland Browns were lured to Baltimore by funding for a new stadium. The band kept its name at first, but at the opening of the city’s new stadium in 1998, it was announced as Baltimore’s Marching Ravens.

— Jenny Vrentas

Pro Football Hall of Fame

Chargers’ Playbook From 1981 Postseason

The MMQB presents NFL 95, a special project—unveiled every Wednesday from May through July—detailing 95 artifacts that tell the story of the NFL, as the league prepares to enter its 95th season. See the entire series here.

At the end of the 1981 season, during a divisional round game in which the Chargers and Dolphins combined for the most passing yards in a postseason contest (809), easily the most impressive play was a blocked field goal. They only happen about a dozen times a season, but San Diego had a plan—and the perfect weapon—to block Miami’s 43-yard attempt at the end of regulation.

Tackles Louie Kelcher and Gary Johnson got interior penetration, allowing 6-6 tight end Kellen Winslow to reach skyward and barely tip the ball, forcing it to fall short. The game went into overtime, and Chargers kicker Rolf Benirschke eventually nailed the game-winner from 29 yards out for a 41-38 victory.

Winslow played with a shoulder injury and battled cramps throughout his body during the second half, but the oppressive Florida heat couldn’t stop the future Hall of Famer: He finished with 13 receptions for 166 yards and a touchdown; the picture of him being carried off the field due to exhaustion at the Orange Bowl has become iconic. (The following weekend in Cincinnati, the Chargers lost the AFC Championship Game by three touchdowns in a game played in -32 windchill conditions that has become known as the Freezer Bowl.)

— Robert Klemko

John DePetro/The MMQB

The White Football

The MMQB presents NFL 95, a special project—unveiled every Wednesday from May through July—detailing 95 artifacts that tell the story of the NFL, as the league prepares to enter its 95th season. See the entire series here.

Long before playing under the lights was considered prime time, it was an oddity that called for a most unusual piece of equipment. The Providence Steam Roller’s meeting with the Chicago Cardinals on Nov. 6, 1929, was the first NFL game played at night, and the teams used a white ball in case of foundering floodlights.

The white football—which a local newspaper compared to a large egg seeming apt to crack each time it was passed through the air—actually outlasted the Steam Roller franchise, being used well into the 1950s. It was showcased by Otto Graham and the Cleveland Browns on the evening of Sept. 16, 1950, when they made a roaring entrance into the NFL by stunning the defending champion Philadelphia Eagles; it even snuck onto a few football trading cards of that era.

But there were drawbacks: Players complained that it was slippery and hard to distinguish from white uniforms. By 1956, the white football was extinct in the NFL, rendered needless by high-watt floodlights and TV lighting requirements—a shame, if only for the fact that it could have been a star during the power outage of Super Bowl XLVII.

— Jenny Vrentas

The Browns’ Mac Speedie carries the white ball in Cleveland’s Sept. 1950 night-game victory over the Eagles. (AP)

rhinobean · May 29, 2014

Love these articles! Haven't read them all yet. They couldn't have started with anything better than Sabol! Thank You!

Prime Time · May 31, 2014

Bill Walsh’s Coaching Tapes: The Perils of New York(VIDEO)

Prime Time · Jun 4, 2014

Video Replay Monitor

The MMQB presents NFL 95, a special project—unveiled every Wednesday from May through July—detailing 95 artifacts that tell the story of the NFL, as the league prepares to enter its 95th season. See the entire series here.

Can you imagine an NFL game without at least one pivotal replay review? Today the image of an official ducking under the tarp just before the commercial break is commonplace, but in 1986 the concept was met with much derision. Following years of debate about whether to leave officiating in the hands of the men on the field or to turn to technology for assistance—why let bad calls stand when everyone watching on television can see that they’re obviously wrong?—owners voted by 23-4-1 to approve limited replay for the ’86 season.

The first ever review, on the third play from scrimmage during Cleveland’s Week 1 visit to Chicago that year, upheld Browns defensive back Al Gross’ end zone fumble recovery for a touchdown. Only the Browns, it seemed, were happy. “There is nothing more boring in all of sports,” SI’s Jack McCallum wrote in 1987, “than watching 22 behemoths twiddle their thumbs while an unseen auditor in a booth studies a replay.”

There was plenty reason to be skeptical of the value of replay back then: 336 of the 374 plays chosen for review by the officials were upheld that first season, and as today some calls that were overturned were later judged to have been correct on the field. Football nation engaged in philosophical debates about the meaning of “indisputable visual evidence” or asked what the point was. When Pete Rozelle retired in 1989, support declined, and owners voted to scrap review from 1992 to 1998. It returned with a new, more refined scope in ’99—and better results. Today about 40% of plays are overturned. Nobody seems to mind the breaks.

—Robert Klemko

Courtesy Everett Collection

‘The Dirty Dozen’ Poster

The MMQB presents NFL 95, a special project—unveiled every Wednesday from May through July—detailing 95 artifacts that tell the story of the NFL, as the league prepares to enter its 95th season. See the entire series here.

JIM BROWN QUITS FOOTBALL FOR THE MOVIES

The Associated Press headline wasn’t exactly true. Jim Brown quit football at 30 years old for Jim Brown, as he would later tell it. For starters he was bored, just a few months after winning the league’s MVP award for 1965. “I wanted more mental stimulation than I would have had playing football,” he said on July 13, 1966, the day of his retirement, And Brown, then the NFL’s all-time leading rusher, didn’t want to fade away in the manner of a Joe Louis or, later, a Muhammad Ali. “People had sympathy for them,” Brown would say in coming years, “and you should never have sympathy for a champion.”

And yes, he wanted to be a movie star. The Dirty Dozen, a World War II action film about a group of Army convicts who are turned into an elite commando unit for a suicide mission, set him on the right path: Brown filled director Robert Aldrich’s vision for the first militant black hero in an action film. As modern-day movie critic Gary Susman notes, before Brown’s Robert Jefferson role, audience-friendly black characters typically turned the other cheek. Jefferson, on the other hand, slugged a character who called him a “n—–.”

Dirty Dozen co-star Ernest Borgnine wrote years later that Aldrich was urged by MGM execs to drop Brown’s death scene, in which he is gunned down after laying waste to a chateau full of German soldiers and civilians. The film would win an Oscar, they told Aldrich, if he cut it. He refused, and the scene upset audiences across the nation. In that way, Aldrich’s film seemed to mimic Brown’s unpopular and unexpected choice to leave football after nine brilliant seasons. Dozen character Samson Posey, played by Clint Walker, may have said it best: “I reckon the folks’d be a sight happier if I died like a soldier. Can’t say I would.”

— Robert Klemko

Lloyd Pearson/AP/The Baltimore Sun

The Colts’ Mayflower Trucks

The MMQB presents NFL 95, a special project—unveiled every Wednesday from May through July—detailing 95 artifacts that tell the story of the NFL, as the league prepares to enter its 95th season. See the entire series here.

Late Baltimore Sun photographer Lloyd Pearson, a travel nut who guessed he’d crossed the U.S. 73 times in 25 cars and was engaged to his sweetheart within weeks of meeting her after their WWII pen-palling, caught perhaps the most iconic photo of a team leaving behind a city in American sports history.

Early during the morning of March 28, 1984, with Phoenix representatives turning away Bob Irsay and his Colts and the Maryland state legislature on the verge of giving Baltimore eminent domain over the team, Irsay and Indianapolis mayor William Hudnut pulled the trigger on a move that would shake up the NFL and help shape its future: The Colts were headed to Indy. Mayflower, the trucking company chaired by Hudnut’s friend and neighbor, offered to do the move for free, enlisting a stable of Sigma Chi brothers from the University of Maryland to pull off the secret midnight escapte. The word got around Baltimore, and Pearson, who died in 2012 at age 90, was dispatched to team headquarters in Owings Mills to capture a scene that would play out several more times in the league’s modern era, but never under such clandestine circumstances.

Wrote former Sun editor Ernest Imhoff of the picture Pearson snapped through the snowflakes: “This single photograph made owner Irsay the devil for many Baltimore fans and the hero of Indianapolis.”

— Robert Klemko

Neil Leifer /Sports Illustrated/Getty Images

The Astrodome

The MMQB presents NFL 95, a special project—unveiled every Wednesday from May through July—detailing 95 artifacts that tell the story of the NFL, as the league prepares to enter its 95th season. See the entire series here.

Here sits the first domed stadium, currently gutted and underused, but preserved for now. Unique in every conceivable way, from luxury boxes decorated like living rooms to a $2 million scoreboard, the Astrodome opened in 1965 with an exhibition game between the Yankees and the Astros (formerly the Colt .45s, re-christened that year) watched by President Johnson and his wife, Ladybird, from the owner’s skybox. The “Eighth Wonder of the World” became home to the Oilers in 1968 and served both teams into the late ’90s, when the football team left for Tennessee and the baseball team into a new park.

When the NFL came knocking again with a new team in Houston the early 2000s, a retractable roof stadium went up right next to the old Astrodome. While the Astrodome has mostly sat idle for more than a decade and its future is unclear—it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2013 in an effort to preserve it—its legacy permeates the NFL. The Astrodome gave us Astroturf, guarded the field from the elements and introduced a new way to play football: fast, fast, fast.

How would Warren Moon’s run-and-shoot Oilers have fared on natural grass chewed up by a season of football in the heat of Houston? Would the Greatest Show on Turf, the Kurt Warner-led Rams, have reached those unprecedented heights if not for the Edward Jones Dome, one of the Astrodome’s many progeny? Would Randy Moss have been great on the frozen tundra of old Met Stadium in Minnesota, or did the fast track of the Metrodome help him in December when it was 72° inside instead of 2° outside? It can’t be a coincidence that eight out of the top 12 all time leaders for receiving yards played the majority of their careers for teams in domed stadiums.

Yet the enduring ‘soft’ label for indoor teams prompted then-Lions coach Jim Schwartz in 2009 to shovel dirt on the old dome model. “We don’t plan on being ‘The Greatest Show on Turf’; we’re going to build it like an outdoor team,” Schwartz said. “We need to be built to have to go up to Lambeau Field in late December and win a game.” Indeed, here’s the most enduring legacy of the Astrodome: Ever since it inspired a handful of NFL cities to follow its footsteps, dome teams are 4–23 in the playoffs when playing outdoors in temperatures 35° or colder.

— Robert Klemko

Bill Frakes for Sports Illustrated

The Madden Cruiser

The MMQB presents NFL 95, a special project—unveiled every Wednesday from May through July—detailing 95 artifacts that tell the story of the NFL, as the league prepares to enter its 95th season. See the entire series here.

CBS once rented Dolly Parton’s tour bus for John Madden, as a solution for his famous fear of flying. Soon after that he got his own vehicle, and The Madden Cruiser became an icon in itself. The custom bus debuted in the 1980s and logged 80,000 miles annually, transporting John Madden to his broadcast gigs across the country.

It had all the essentials: a bed, a stocked refrigerator and a mobile office where Madden broke down film or got his coaching buddies on the horn. Madden already had plenty on his résumé when he became a broadcaster: During 10 seasons as the head coach of the Oakland Raiders, he won Super Bowl XI and was the youngest coach to reach 100 wins. But he earned the affection of fans nationwide in his second career, as a color commentator for all four major TV networks, with his coach’s eye and endearing Madden-isms—Boom! Doink!

Madden retired from broadcasting in 2009, after three decades, though his name is entrenched in American pop culture through the best-selling EA Sports video game that bears his name. And the Madden Cruiser remains a fond memory: Quirky and wildly popular, just like the man it carried.

— Jenny Vrentas

In 1990 Peter King joined John Madden for a coast-to-coast trip aboard the Madden Cruiser. Read the full story here.

John DePetro/The MMQB

The Pen That Ended the 2011 Lockout

The MMQB presents NFL 95, a special project—unveiled every Wednesday from May through July—detailing 95 artifacts that tell the story of the NFL, as the league prepares to enter its 95th season. See the entire series here.

For 136 days in 2011, there was no NFL. There were court dates, secret meetings and Pro Bowl quarterbacks working out at high school gyms. There were cantankerous negotiations between the league’s owners and the players association about revenue sharing, a potential 18-game season, a rookie wage scale and the salary cap. There were legitimate concerns that the 2011 regular season would be interrupted. And then there was a pen, gripped by commissioner Roger Goodell, that restored normalcy.

On July 25 the NFL announced the signing of a new 10-year collective bargaining agreement, ending the longest work stoppage in league history (topping the 57-day strike of 1982 and 24-day squabble of 1987). This CBA required teams to spend more to reach the salary cap and shrunk rookie contracts. Owners would receive 53 percent of the league’s annual revenue—it was $9 billion at the time—and players 47 percent, as opposed to the previous formula, which was roughly 50-50. Though money was certainly a focal point—the public groaned, categorizing the impasse as millionaires fighting billionaires—other clauses revealed a shift for the league. For example, an emphasis on player safety was addressed, with strict limitations on off-season workouts, as well as nearly $1 billion going towards improved benefits for retired players.

Nearly three years have passed, and the deal’s legacy is still unfolding, but one thing is certain: Everyone—owners, players and fans—breathed a sigh of relief when Goodell declared, “Football is back.” Four and a half months was a frighteningly long time without it.

— Emily Kaplan

John DePetro/The MMQB

1924 Scheduling Letter Between Rivals

The MMQB presents NFL 95, a special project—unveiled every Wednesday from May through July—detailing 95 artifacts that tell the story of the NFL, as the league prepares to enter its 95th season. See the entire series here.

This is how scheduling got done in 1924: You wrote a handful of letters and waited for replies. There was no set calendar at the beginning of the season, and games could be added midseason. In ’24, eight years before the institution of playoffs, the Kenosha Maroons played five league games, winning none, and the league champion Cleveland Bulldogs played nine, winning seven.

If you think the Buffalo Bisons’ plea for a December meeting with the Chicago Bears seems terse and annoyed, you’re probably right. There was bad blood between the teams. In ’21, Buffalo owner Frank McNeil (his team was then called the All-Americans) felt good enough about a 8-0-2 finish to declare their season over pending a championship awarded by the league, but decided to play two more games that he announced to local media as exhibition contests. He dumped some loaner players, watched his team shut out the Akron Pros 14–0, then had the All-Americans take an overnight train to Chicago for a friendly rematch with the Staleys the next day, Dec. 4. (Buffalo had beaten Chicago earlier that season).

Chicago won 10–7, and then Staleys owner/coach George Halas squeezed in two more games to try to put Chicago ahead in the standings. Chicago won one and tied the other, matching Buffalo’s record despite McNeil’s insistence that his team’s last two games were exhibitions. The league decided that Chicago was the champion, thanks to a rule stating that a rematch carried more weight than the first game. In Buffalo, the disputed ’21 title became known as the Staley Swindle.

— Robert Klemko

E.F. “Tommy” Hughitt starred as a player and coach for the Buffalo teams of 1921 and ’24. (John DePetro/The MMQB)

Getty Images

Toradol

The MMQB presents NFL 95, a special project—unveiled every Wednesday from May through July—detailing 95 artifacts that tell the story of the NFL, as the league prepares to enter its 95th season. See the entire series here.

The drug comes in pill form, but inject 30 to 60 mg into the butt and it will act even faster. Regular use could lead to gastrointestinal bleeding and kidney damage. Ketorolac Tromethamine (better known as Toradol) may sound dangerous, and it very well might be. But since being approved by the FDA in 1989, it has been the NFL’s go-to wonder drug, an amped-up Aleve that numbs the pain away—even if the pain doesn’t exist yet. As Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher famously told HBO’s Real Sports in 2012: “It’s normal. You drop your pants, you get the alcohol [swab], they give you a shot, put the Band-Aid on and you go out and play.”

In a violent sport that lauds toughness, pain management has always been a complex issue. That’s why the prevalence of Toradol isn’t surprising. While the non-narcotic is not physically addictive, some doctors have raised questions about its long-term effects, especially when served with a cocktail of other drugs. Whether players have been properly clued in on that is murky as well as a springboard for several lawsuits, including one filed by eight plaintiffs—among them Richard Dent and Jim McMahon—in May. Although some teams have shied away from using Toradol, the ritual of players lining up for a pre-game syringe was commonplace for more than two decades. Its full impact is still cloaked, for now.

— Emily Kaplan

Prime Time · Jun 6, 2014

1958 NFL Championship Game Goalpost

The MMQB presents NFL 95, a special project—unveiled every Wednesday from May through July—detailing 95 artifacts that tell the story of the NFL, as the league prepares to enter its 95th season. See the entire series here.

The NFL’s luck with the weather at the Super Bowl XLVIII in New Jersey was nothing compared to what happened in 1958.

The Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants met in the NFL Championship that year, three days after Christmas at a sold-out Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. They had an even bigger audience across America: 45 million viewers watched the first championship to be nationally televised. The eight fumbles aren’t what distinguishes this game in history. The finish did that.

Colts quarterback Johnny Unitas led the first famous (and maybe best-ever) version of the “two-minute drill,” marching downfield from his own 14-yard line for the tying field goal that sent the game into sudden-death overtime. The Giants won the coin toss, but punted. Unitas again drove his team for the winning touchdown, a 1-yard run by Alan Ameche to cap the 13-play, 80-yard march.

Recent Super Bowls have had thrilling finishes—look no further than the Giants’ upset of the undefeated Patriots in Super Bowl XLII—but this game stands alone in two significant ways. It’s still the only championship game to be decided in overtime, and even greater, the national audience was enchanted by a burgeoning sport. Next came national TV contracts in the 1960s, a catalyst to the unparalleled popularity the NFL enjoys today. The “Greatest Game Ever Played” might also be the league’s most important.

—Jenny Vrentas

Prime Time · Jun 11, 2014

Courtesy Pro Football Hall of Fame

The First Helmet Radio: Paul Brown and Football’s Forgotten Dynasty
Long before Manziel Mania, the Cleveland Browns were the game’s dominant franchise, with a daring and innovative coach who pushed the NFL into the modern age. So how did it go so wrong?
------------------------------------------------
Editor’s note: This is the fifth in The MMQB’s 10-part series NFL 95: A History of Pro Football in 95 Objects, commemorating the 95th season of the NFL in 2014. Each Wednesday through the start of training camp in July, The MMQB will unveil one long-form story on an artifact of particular significance to the history of the NFL, accompanied by other objects that trace the rise of professional football in America, from the NFL’s founding in a Hupmobile dealership in Canton in 1920 to its place today at the forefront of American sports and popular culture.

BY MARK BECHTEL

Of all the things a Cleveland police officer expected to see on an otherwise normal 1956 day, a grown man roaming out of the woods wearing a helmet that was making strange noises couldn’t have ranked too high on the list. But there he was, George Sarles, ambling into the arms of one of Cleveland’s finest with an orange football helmet on his head, listening to the sounds being picked up by the four-watt receiver inside.

Who knows what the cop thought? It was the peak of the Cold War, the space race was just gaining momentum, and a fair amount of rocket work was being done at Lewis Research Center a few miles from the Cleveland airport. Sarles might have looked like a crashed Soviet recon pilot, but he wasn’t. He was an electronics gadget salesman, and he was testing out a new invention at the behest of Paul Brown: a radio communication system that would allow Brown, the head coach of the Cleveland Browns, to communicate with his quarterback during games.

Sarles and his friend, a GE engineer named John Campbell, had come up with the idea and approached Brown, who received the idea warmly. It wasn’t Brown’s first time dabbling in revolutionary headgear. A year earlier he had patented the single-bar facemask, not long after jury-rigging a lucite mask to protect his injured quarterback, Otto Graham. Brown saw the helmet transistor as just one of the possible uses of radio technology: Eventually he hoped to stick observers high up in eagle-eye vantage points in stadiums and communicate with them over shortwave. (A vision that, of course, came to fruition years later with communications between assistant coaches up in a booth and the men on the sideline.)

Luckily, the policeman who discovered Sarles was a football fan, and he sent the salesman on his way. Satisfied that the helmet would give him an edge, Brown first used it in a preseason game against the Detroit Lions that year. Since Brown was technically broadcasting a radio signal, he had to obtain a call number—19A1661—from the FCC. The Lions became suspicious when they realized that Brown was no longer using offensive linemen to shuttle in plays. In the second half, a Lions assistant finally discovered the transmitter attached to a light post behind the Cleveland bench.

When word of the radio system got out, Brown faced backlash from around the league, but that didn’t stop him from using it. During the 1956 season opener against the Cardinals in Chicago, quarterback George Ratterman wore the helmet and had to contend with outside interference. “I’m getting cab calls from Michigan Avenue to State Avenue,” he complained to his teammates.

Two weeks later, as the controversy raged on, Brown announced his intention to use the device against the Giants at Yankee Stadium—and went so far as to warn New York that interfering with the signals would be a violation of FCC regulations that would subject them to a $10,000 fine. The Giants simply listened in and asked a former Browns player to decipher what was being said, then prepared accordingly. Of course, not everything he heard was football related. Among the chatter picked up were NYPD communications.

The experiment finally ran its course when Ratterman called timeout, took off the helmet and reported to Brown: “Coach, some guy just got stabbed over on Fifth Avenue.” With New York sitting on Cleveland’s plays, Brown finally had Ratterman go back to a traditional helmet. A few days after the game, which the Giants won 21–9, commissioner Bert Bell outlawed radio-equipped headgear.

Three weeks later Ratterman would suffer a career-ending knee injury, an early victim of the SI cover jinx. He landed on his feet—barely. In 1961, while he was running for sheriff of Campbell County, Ky., a band of local criminals drugged him, put him in a hotel room with a stripper, and hired a photographer to document the whole thing. Ultimately the photographer confessed, Ratterman was elected, and, he boasted later, “In four years I got rid of the gambling and the prostitution—and I didn’t get killed.” The helmet also survived: It’s now part of the Hall of Fame’s Gridiron Glory traveling exhibit.

Ironically, Brown had already pioneered a way to deliver plays to the huddle: the messenger guard. (Brown was the rare coach who called his plays, which was a source of tension between himself and Graham.) But Brown was a man constantly in search of an edge, so when the opportunity to refine his communication system presented itself, he jumped. That was the way he operated.

For a man whose life away from the football field was straight-laced to the point of being dull, Paul Brown loved being on the cutting edge. And the result of that perpetual desire for innovation was one of the most criminally underappreciated eras in the history of pro football, a decade in which the Browns were the sport’s model franchise. That’s the Cleveland Browns, the team that has in recent years so expertly combined abject on-field performances with comical front-office moves that its rich tradition has been all but overwhelmed by the odious olio of misery it serves its fans for dinner every autumn Sunday.

And in their heyday, the Browns didn’t just win. They revolutionized the game and made football fans reconsider everything they thought they knew about the game. It all began with an upstart league and a coach with an experimental streak.

* * *

The All-America Football Conference was founded in 1944 by Chicago newspaperman Arch Ward, who had also been responsible for the birth of baseball’s All-Star Game. The Cleveland franchise was owned by Mickey McBride, a local real estate and taxicab tycoon. After a deal to bring Notre Dame coach Frank Leahy to Cleveland fell through, McBride turned his attention to Paul Brown, who had led Ohio State to the 1942 national championship before taking a job as the coach at Great Lakes Naval Station during World War II.

(Another Brown innovation: the taxi squad, a collection of non-roster reserve players ready at a moment’s notice; the moniker originated because Brown gave the players jobs driving cabs for McBride. The idea lives on in teams’ practice squads.)

Paul Brown (left) and owner Mickey McBride celebrated with players after the Browns won their second straight AAFC title in December 1947. (AP)

Brown filled his roster largely with players he knew from Ohio State and the Navy. His quarterback, Graham, had beaten the Buckeyes twice when Graham was at Northwestern. Lou Groza, a tackle and kicker, had played on the freshman team at OSU before being sent to Okinawa. End Dante Lavelli was a part of Brown’s title team before he was shipped off to join the 28th Infantry Division. Another end, Mac Speedie, caught Brown’s eye while playing for the Fort Warren base team.

In his search for players, Brown would consider anyone. That led to another innovation, of sorts: the use of African-American players, an unwritten taboo in pro football since 1933. Brown signed Bill Willis, a middle guard from Ohio State, and Marion Motley, a fullback/linebacker from Great Lakes. Willis was a safe bet; the 24-year-old had been the MVP of the 1944 College All-Star Game. Motley was more of a stretch; he was 27 and working in a mill to support four children when Brown reached out. “I think they felt [Willis] needed a roommate,” said Motley, who would go on to win rushing titles in both the AAFC and the NFL. (Another Brown innovation: the draw play, which came about on a busted play when Graham, under extreme pressure, handed the ball to Motley, who slipped past the onrushing defenders for a big gain.)

Willis and Motley were on the field on Sept. 6, 1946, when the Browns beat the Miami Seahawks 44–0 in their first game. The AAFC pair broke pro football’s color barrier two weeks before Woody Strode and Kenny Washington of the Los Angeles Rams became the NFL’s first black players in 13 years. “Paul Brown integrated pro football without uttering a single word about integration,” Jim Brown told sportswriter Terry Pluto years later. “He just went out, signed a bunch of great black athletes, and started kicking butt. That’s how you do it. You don’t talk about it. Paul never said one word about race.”

But Brown wouldn’t sign just anybody. He instituted screening procedures that were stringent by CIA standards, let alone what the football world was accustomed to. He is widely credited with (or blamed for) using the 40-yard dash to gauge players. (Depending on whom you ask, he picked 40 yards either because it’s the farthest distance a player has to sprint on a given play, or because it’s the approximate distance a player has to run to cover a punt.)

In time, the coach developed a quiz that was administered to active and prospective players, a forerunner of the Wonderlic Test. (Sample questions: What is the opposite of diminutive—distraught, large, inductive or reluctant? If lemons sell at three for 10¢, how much will a dozen and a half cost? If the sequence of numbers is 4, 6, 3, 7, 9, 6, 10 what should be the next number?) “Some years ago the test showed that one of the candidates for our team would make a fine carpenter,” Brown said in the early 1960s. “And that’s just what he eventually became.”

Paul Brown and George Ratterman on the cover of SI in October 1956. (Robert Riger/SI)

He insisted on men of high moral standards, team-firsters who wouldn’t cause trouble. “Stars are often figments of sportswriters’ imaginations,” he told Time in 1947. “I want high-grade, intelligent men. There’s no place on my team for big Butch who talks hard and drinks hard. I like a lean and hungry look.”

Brown not only stressed education—he offered his players cash bonuses for going back to school to get their degrees—but he made the experience of being a pro football player akin to being a college student. Each man was given a notebook and was expected to take copious notes. Spot checks were the norm. Brown also pioneered the use of film to grade his players and was the first coach to employ a year-round staff of assistants.

On the field, Brown moved Graham, a single-wing tailback at Northwestern, under center in a T set. The offense featured countless new wrinkles—option routes, timing patterns, the use of a pocket to protect the passer. The rest of the AAFC was no match for Brown’s brilliant schemes. In four years Cleveland was 46-4-3 and won the league title every year. (Another Brown innovation, or would-be innovation: the Super Bowl. His Browns issued a challenge to the NFL for a “world championship game” every year, but the established league never bit.)

After the 1949 season, the NFL agreed to take on three teams: the Browns, the San Francisco 49ers and the Baltimore Colts, who lasted only one year in the NFL before folding. (A new team with the same name took its place in 1953.) Bell, the NFL commisioner, had done his best to ignore the AAFC, refusing to mention it by name and going so far as to ban Pro Football Illustrated from being sold at NFL venues because the publication also profiled AAFC teams in its season preview. But he recognized a good storyline when he saw it. When it came time to make the schedule for the 1950 season, Bell made sure the Browns would play their first game in the closest thing he had to a lion’s den: Philadelphia, the home of the defending champs.

* * *

Super Bowl III, in which Joe Namath’s Jets beat the Colts, is likely the most mythologized games in pro football history. The 1950 season opener had the same storyline—team from upstart league taking on established powerhouse. The thought of the Eagles losing was unfathomable; in addition to winning the 1949 title, Philadelphia had made the championship game in ’47 and ’48. “The worst team in our league could beat the best team in theirs,” said George Marshall, owner of the NFL’s Redskins.

Philadelphia coach Greasy Neale agreed: “The high school kids are coming to play in the pros.”

Marion Motley and the Browns beat the Eagles 35-10 in the 1950 NFL season opener, proving that AAFC teams could more than compete with their NFL counterparts. (AP/NFL Photos/Pro Football Hall of Fame)

A scheduling conflict meant the game couldn’t be played at the Eagles’ regular home, Shibe Park, so it was moved to the much larger Municipal Stadium in Philadelphia, where a crowd of 71,237 (or 33,000 more fans than the Eagles had ever drawn before) showed up. There were no bold predictions from the Browns, no brash guarantee from a flamboyant quarterback. (One look at Graham’s crewcut showed he wasn’t the type to let loose. He had, in the words Grandpa Simpson used to describe Johnny Unitas, “a haircut you can set your watch to.”)

The newbies just came out and destroyed the best the NFL could offer, winning 35–10. The win could be put down to two things: talent and preparation, the latter thanks to another Brown innovation—scouting. The coach had extensively studied the Eagles in 1948 and ’49 when he was trying to put together an AAFC-NFL showdown game. “That gave them a real edge,” Eagles Hall of Fame linebacker Chuck Bednarik told The Morning Call newspaper in 2004. “That’s why now they scout you when you go to the bathroom.”

The New York Times was effusive in its praise of the new kids: “Certainly, the beautifully coached Browns, with Otto Graham, as great as he ever was at Northwestern and since he became a professional, leading the attack, Greasy Neale’s Eagles were made to look bad. The Eagles’ defense against Graham’s passes was woefully weak, even if they managed to minimize the Cleveland trap plays, featuring Marion Motley. Graham went overhead thirty-eight times and completed twenty-one, good for 346 yards and three touchdowns. His was a magnificent display of aerial artistry and his was a job so well done that the difference between the elevens was greater even than the actual margin.”

The result was every bit as remarkable as Super Bowl III—even more, considering that it was the first meeting between the rival leagues that mattered. Neale, however, remained unimpressed. “[Brown would] be a better basketball coach because all he does is put the ball in the air,” he said.

That crack led Brown to, for perhaps the only time in his professional career, if not his life, lead with his heart instead of his head. When the teams met again in Cleveland in December, Brown didn’t call a single passing play. The Browns ran 41 times for 69 yards and one first down. They won anyway, 13–7, on a pick six and two Groza field goals. A couple weeks later, Groza came through again, hitting a 16-yard field goal with 28 seconds left to beat the Rams 30–28 in the NFL Championship Game.

Winning the title their first season in the league proved to be no fluke for the Browns. They advanced to the championship game in each of the next five seasons—winning two more—meaning that when Graham finally retired in 1955, he had played for a league title in each of his 10 seasons as a pro. In their first decade, the Browns were a gaudy 105-16-4, hands down the greatest 10-year period a football team has ever enjoyed.

* * *

So what happened? After Graham left, Ratterman was tapped to play QB. His subsequent knee injury meant the job went to Tommy O’Connell, who completed just 43.8% of his passes as the Browns stumbled to a 5–7 record in 1956. That mark gave Cleveland the fifth pick in the draft, which was used on Jim Brown. With a bruising running game to take the pressure off, O’Connell improved in 1957, leading the Browns back to the title game. But that would be Paul Brown’s last hurrah. He’d never play for another championship.

The simplest explanation is that Paul Brown had been able to hand pick his original team, but when it came time to replace Graham, Lavelli, Motley et al., he was encumbered by the draft, making replenishing the roster more of a chore. But the same demand for discipline that made Paul Brown’s teams so tough to beat ultimately had to play a role in the his undoing.

Every year he began every training camp with a three-hour speech. Three hours. Almost as long as The Ten Commandments, and every bit as preachy. While the material might have worked on a group of young men who, by and large, found themselves in the military in their early 20s, it tended to bristle players who came of age in the 1950s—none moreso than Jim Brown, who said, “I’ve always wanted to play for a coach I feel like going out and dying for. Paul Brown is not that coach.” When quarterback Jim Ninowski was traded from Detroit back to Cleveland in 1962, he threatened to retire, even though he was just 26.

Brown pioneered many of the practices common in today’s NFL, from the draw play to film study, scouting and the taxi squad. (Long Photography Inc./Sports Illustrated)
Bill Walsh worked as an assistant under Brown in Cincinnati, where the two refined the offensive concepts that Walsh would employ in San Francisco. He beat the Bengals in two Super Bowls. (Brian Horton/AP)
Brown confers with quarterback Sam Wyche—who’d later coach Cincinnati in a Super Bowl—during a game in 1969. (Tony Tomsic/Wireimage.com)
After five years out of the game, Brown founded the Bengals in 1968. (Tony Tomsic/Sports Illustrated)
Brown with guard John Wooton on the sideline in ’62 at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco, facing one of the other old AAFC teams, the 49ers. (Neil Leifer/Sports Illustrated)
When Art Modell (left) bought the Browns in 1961, it was the beginning of the end of Paul Brown's tenure with the franchise. He was fired less than two years later. (Henry Barr Collection/Diamond Images/Getty Images)
Strict rules concerning players’ behavior began to wear thin as Cleveland’s dynasty faded. (Neil Leifer/Sports Illustrated)
By 1959, Brown was finding it harder to tap unheralded talent and sustain the winning edge. (Neil Leifer/Sports Illustrated)
Cleveland assistants were placed up high for a bird’s eye view, communicating what they saw down to the field. (Neil Leifer/Sports Illustrated)

Brown on the sideline during the 1954 NFL Championship Game, a 58–10 drubbing of the Lions at Municipal Stadium. It was the ninth of the Browns’ 10 straight appearances in a championship game. (Hy Peskin/Sports Illustrated)

Paul Brown’s annual speech was something to behold. “We don’t want any butchers on this team,” he’d say. “No T-shirts in the dining hall. Don’t eat with your elbows on the table, and eat quietly. We all eat together, every meal, and I want no cliques. I want you to eat at different tables each meal. There is no excuse for missing a meal unless it comes from me. Not an assistant coach or any other official, but from me. I will be at each meal, and I expect you to be.”

Then came the Deuteronomic enumeration of the forbidden vices. “If you’re a drinker or a chaser you’ll weaken the team and we don’t want you. We’re just here for one thing—to win. If I hear you’ve been drinking, I’ll ask you in front of the squad. If you have, you’re through. If you have and deny it, you’ve branded yourself a liar in front of the team.

“You are to watch your dress, your language and the company you keep. When we’re traveling, stay away from that stranger who may want to take you to dinner or talk to you in a hotel lobby. Maybe he isn’t a gambler or after information, but stay away from him anyway.

“The rules for training camp and on the road are simple. In your room at 10 and lights out at 10:30. Sometimes the coaches make a bed check. There is an automatic fine of $500 for any player who sneaks out after bed check. That sticks, too. I have had to levy fines in the past and I have never rescinded one for subsequent good behavior or meritorious performance.”

Brown coached the Bengals for eight seasons; his son still runs the team. (James Drake/SI)

In 1962, Brown related a story to Tex Maule of SI. “A few years ago we had a big end,” the coach said. “I heard he chewed tobacco and spit it on the wall next to his bed. Can you imagine that?

“I went to his room. I told him that I would fine him $500 if he didn’t wash down the walls. Then I stood and watched him wash them. Can you imagine living with an animal like that?”

Brown once turned down champagne at a party someone threw for his birthday because it was in-season. He probably would not have appreciated the Las Vegas exploits of the latest would-be heir to Graham, Johnny Manziel.

In 1961, 35-year-old advertising executive Art Modell bought the team. Unlike past owners, Modell wanted an active role. Brown had always represented the team at league meetings and cast the franchise’s vote in NFL matters, but Modell decreed that he and Brown would attend together. Both parties said all the right things, but it was soon clear that the two could not co-exist. The relationship officially derailed when Brown traded Bobby Mitchell to Washington and Modell found out about it from Marshall, the Redskins’ owner.

Modell waited until both Cleveland newspapers were on strike, and then he fired Brown in January 1963. That ruse didn’t do much to endear Modell to Clevelanders, but the fact remains that following Brown’s firing, player rep Bernie Parrish was quoted as saying, “After contacting most of our veteran players, I found that it was the virtually unanimous opinion that it was time for a change.” Under Blanton Collier, Brown’s top assistant, Cleveland won the championship two years later. The city hasn’t won a thing since.

Brown didn’t return to the sidelines until 1968—the year after he was enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame—when he founded the Cincinnati Bengals. Ever the innovator, he and assistant Bill Walsh tweaked Brown’s old passing attack into an early version of the West Coast offense. (Bill Belichick recently argued that it should really be called the Ohio River Offense.) Brown coached the Bengals for eight years, going 55-56-1, and retired after the 1975 season. He died in 1991, and his son Mike inherited the Cincinnati franchise. Its home, the $455 million Paul Brown Stadium, opened in 2000.

Three years after Paul Brown’s death the NFL adopted a rule allowing coaches to communicate with quarterbacks by way of a helmet radio, nearly three decades after Brown first broached the idea. It was a reminder that while his magical run in Cleveland came undone by his failure to keep up with the times, on the field he was always way ahead of them.

Prime Time · Jun 11, 2014

How About a Shower, Coach? Photo Gallery: Super Bowl Gatorade dunkings through the years
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Vincent Laforet/AFP/Getty Images

Mike Ditka’s Cigar

The MMQB presents NFL 95, a special project—unveiled every Wednesday from May through July—detailing 95 artifacts that tell the story of the NFL, as the league prepares to enter its 95th season. See the entire series here.
They don’t build ‘em like the ’85 Bears anymore. That started at the top with head coach Mike Ditka, the gruff former NFL tight end whose penchant for smoking cigars rubbed off on his team.

Ditka was beloved in the Windy City after a playing career that included Chicago’s first NFL championship in 1963. He returned in ’82 as the Bears’ head coach and made good on his promise to bring the team another title in short order. Ditka’s feud with defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan was as famous as Ryan’s 46 defense, but that simply added to the personality of a team that was cocky and fun-loving.

Ditka was often seen lighting up a cigar, and they were passed out in the locker room after the Bears blanked the Rams, 24–0, in the NFC Championship Game. Chicago’s 46–10 domination of the Patriots in Super Bowl XX two weeks later called for an even bigger celebration: cigars and champagne for one of the greatest teams of all time.

Though Ditka worship was at first limited to Chicagoland, his godhood went national with Saturday Night Live’s now legendary “Superfans” skits—the cigar featured prominently, as did the trademark Ditka ’stache, the aviator shades and mounds of sausage. More than two decades after it first aired, the bratwurst-loving, Ditka-philic Superfans live on in State Farm commercials. Talk about a legacy.

Courtesy of Hy-Vee

Kurt Warner’s Hy-Vee

The MMQB presents NFL 95, a special project—unveiled every Wednesday from May through July—detailing 95 artifacts that tell the story of the NFL, as the league prepares to enter its 95th season. See the entire series here.
Before Kurt Warner caught on with the Rams, sparking a storied pro career that included two league MVP awards and a Super Bowl title, it was all nearly derailed by a spider. We all know the story of Warner bagging groceries and stocking shelves at a Hy-Vee in Cedar Falls, Iowa (pictured above), before catching his big break. But did you know an arachnid’s bite interrupted plans for an NFL tryout a year earlier?

After two seasons with the Arena League’s Iowa Barnstormers, Warner earned a shot with the Chicago Bears but couldn’t attend the tryout after suffering a spider bite on his honeymoon. The Bears went another way, and the Rams came calling a year later. (Efforts to locate the spider were unsuccessful, so we went with the grocery store).

Warner is far from the only NFL great with a bizarre how-I-made-it story: Colts legend Johnny Unitas famously hitchhiked back to Pittsburgh from Steelers training camp, opting to save the bus fare the Steelers forked over after cutting him. He played semi-pro ball for $6 a game before getting his shot with Baltimore. The humble Warner can certainly relate.

— Robert Klemko

A slightly larger crowd surrounded the Super Bowl XXXIV MVP in Atlanta than he ever encountered at the Hy-Vee. (Bill Frakes/SI)

Prime Time · Jun 12, 2014

Tom Landry’s Fedora
The coach’s unassuming hat became a symbol of plainspoken Cowboys excellence during a reign that included 20 years straight winning seasons. read more →

Pete Rozelle’s Typewriter
The future commissioner tapped out high school sports reports on the same machine that became a transformative communication tool when he took over the NFL. read more →

Johnny Unitas’ High-Tops
Styles changed, and so did the playing surfaces, but Johnny U didn’t yield on his choice of old-school footwear. With an arm like that, what did it matter what he had on his feet? read more →

1920 Akron Pros Fob
The first NFL champions—the title was decided by committee, not on the field—got little gold trinkets rather than blinged out rings. read more →

Brett Favre’s Deactivation Report
A simple sheet of paper brought to an end one of the game’s most remarkable ironman streaks—Favre’s record 297 straight starts at quarterback. read more →

Prime Time · Jun 18, 2014

Getty Images

Television: Better Than the Real Thing—and Getting More So Every Year
It’s the primary means by which fans connect with football, and as technology improves—bigger screens, sharper images and magic we can only imagine right now—TV’s power and influence on the NFL will only grow
By Richard Deitsch

Editor’s note: This is the sixth in The MMQB’s series NFL 95: A History of Pro Football in 95 Objects, commemorating the 95th season of the NFL in 2014. On Wednesdays through the start of training camp in July, The MMQB will unveil one long-form story on an artifact of particular significance to the history of the NFL, accompanied by other objects that trace the rise of professional football in America, from the NFL’s founding in a Hupmobile dealership in Canton in 1920 to its place today at the forefront of American sports and popular culture.

Gordy Brown is a man with options. First, in his home in Sanford, Fla., there is the 75-inch Samsung HD television, which is permanently assigned to his beloved Detroit Lions during the NFL season. There’s also the 50-inch Samsung HD television tuned to the Red Zone Channel, so Brown can keep up with his three fantasy football teams. Next in line is the 46-inch Samsung HDTV which is responsible for what Brown considers the best NFL game every Sunday. There’s also a fourth (a 32-inch Samsung HDTV) and fifth television (a 42-inch LG HDTV) available in case his guests have specific rooting interests. And we’re not even counting Brown’s tablet, which is usually airing an NFL game on Sundays too.

But things really get interesting for Sunday Night Football and Monday Night Football.

That’s when Brown abandons his living room and heads outside to the lanai (a covered porch) and his in-ground pool. There, he has a dream home theater setup—a 16-by-9-foot screen and an Optoma HD66 3D-capable projector. Brown says he has been infatuated with projectors since high school, and one night while in sitting in his pool he had an epiphany: What if he could install a projector poolside? “I’m a computer guy so I love to play with electronics and I’m also a sports nut,” Brown said. “Sports is all I watch.”

His electronic outdoor Shangri-La also includes surround sound and the ability to stream the Internet. Brown said he has religiously watched primetime football poolside every week for the past three NFL seasons. Not surprisingly with his indoor-outdoor setup, he and his wife, Jen, have company over most NFL weeks. They also share space with a four-year-old American bulldog named Joey and a three-year-old boxer-beagle named Jazzie.

Gordy Brown’s Florida home features a poolside projector screen, religiously tuned to NFL games on Sunday and Monday nights in the fall. (Photo courtesy Gordy Brown)

“I could not imagine weekends without it, especially being a Lions fan and the Fantasy football aspect on top of that,” said Brown, a 27-year-old network administrator for the City of Altamonte Springs, Fla. “The outdoor setup is my baby, my project, and I love it.”

Brown, who grew up in Mayville, Mich., and retains his Wolverine State allegiances, is obviously not alone as a member of the NFL’s Television Nation. Much has been written about how the home-viewing experience has become far superior to the game atmosphere, and in fact you can easily make a compelling argument that television is the most significant football-related object in the lives of NFL fans today. Last year’s opening weekend set of games (Sept. 5-9, 2013) drew 108.4 million viewers, according to the league, the fourth consecutive Kickoff Weekend with a total reach exceeding 105 million viewers.

The conference championship games last January averaged 53.7 million viewers, the most-watched conference championship Sunday in more than 30 years. And despite the blowout nature of Super Bowl XLVIII, the game between Seattle and Denver set a record for the most-watched television show in U.S. history with 111.5 million viewers, topping the previous record of the 111.34 million who watched the 2012 Super Bowl.

Two of those are a football-loving couple in the North Hills area near Pittsburgh who also have distinctive home-viewing setup. Michael Puck, a 32-year-old social media marketer, is a born and bred Bengals fan, and his wife, Erica, is a native of Steeltown and a stay-at-home mother of three-year-old Dylan and two-year-old Austin. The couple have two 75-inch televisions ($4,000 each) mounted side by side on the wall of their basement, a room split between a play area for their young sons and football-watching for the adults.

The couple has a longtime subscription to DirecTV’s Sunday Ticket, and every weekend the television on the left is set to Michael’s Bengals while the one on the right plays Erica’s Steelers. (They also keep helmets of each team below the televisions and own Bengals and Steelers beanbag chairs.) If one team wins and the other loses, the fan of the losing team is charged with making dinner. “We have a friendly rivalry,” says Michael. “But I have conceded that the Steelers are one of the marquee franchises in the NFL. At least I have had some bragging rights the last couple of years.”

Puck had season tickets for the Bengals from 2004 to 2007 when he lived in Indianapolis and made the two-hour drive to Cincinnati for every Bengals home game. But echoing many fans, he said the home experience has become too enjoyable (and too comfortable) for him to keep attending games in person. “I would much rather be at home and watch two games at the same time than fight traffic, pay vending prices and all that kind of stuff,” Puck says. “My in-laws have season tickets to the Steelers, and I will be honest with you: You could not pay me to go to the games.”

* * *

So why does the NFL work so well on television? Part of it is scarcity. Each team plays one game week per week, making the campaign akin to a season-long playoff format. Something Hall of Fame broadcaster John Madden told the Baltimore Sun in 2005 also remains true: The sport is set up to run like episodic television. “It is the perfect sport to televise,” Madden said. “We have change of possession, and there’s a timeout every change of possession, and there’s a commercial.”

Michael and Erica Puck’s Pennsylvania home features side-by-side 75-inch televisions—one for watching Erica’s Steelers and one for Michael’s Bengals. (Photo courtesy Puck family)

History is also a factor. Michael MacCambridge, the author of America’s Game, an expansive history of the NFL that was published in 2004, said that the revenue-sharing agreement the late NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle pushed through Congress and the league’s owners in 1961 is inextricably linked to television’s impact on the sport. The agreement championed by Rozelle removed the financial disparities between teams and became the fiscal engine that drove the NFL’s wealth.

A visionary when it came to the potential of national television, Rozelle convinced the individual league owners of the power of collectivism, persuading them to give up their local television rights in exchange for selling the product as a league-wide package. He brilliantly foresaw television’s power as a growth agent at a time when NFL owners were still of the belief that the primary way to sell their product was through in-home viewing. Today, the network television partners—CBS, Fox, NBC and ESPN—provide the NFL with about $6 billion annually. By 2027, Navigate Research predicts, such media-rights revenues could reach $17 billion, according to USA Today.

“If you have the revenue-sharing agreement without television, you would have teams arguing over when their home games are and who gets to play on Thanksgiving and holidays,” said MacCambridge, who is working on a book about the late Hall of Fame Steelers coach Chuck Noll. “The league would have a piecemeal, small-minded mindset.”

If you want other touchstones involving television that helped build NFL, MacCambridge suggests the iconic 1958 NFL championship game between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants (watched by 45 million Americans and dubbed by SI “The Greatest Game Ever Played”) and the creation of Monday Night Football in 1970. Professional football had become a hot sport in America during the 1960s—Time magazine declared it the sport of that decade—but people still thought Rozelle was crazy for wanting to air pro football in primetime.

ABC originally passed on the Monday night package before signing off on it and airing the program in 1970. “It is the single most influential sports series of all time,” says MacCambridge, “because everything since then followed in the wake—from storylines going into games to keying on certain players.”

From a technology standpoint, Ken Aagaard, an executive vice president of engineering, operations and production services for CBS Sports and a 30-year sports television executive, suggests that instant replay, the first-down line and aerial cameras were key television movers. I’d also add the creation of the mythmaking, artistically brilliant propaganda machine known as NFL Films.

* * *

So what kind of impact will television have on the NFL 10 years from now? There is one surefire lock: You will clearly have a better-looking picture. Ultra high definition television, also known as 4K and 8K viewing, is coming in some form. The technology has at least four times the resolution of current high-definition televisions, and will become more commonplace when the price comes down and broadcasters get more bandwidth for it.

Viewers should also expect graphics and animation to continue to evolve at the pace technology allows it. NBC’s Sunday Night Football producer Fred Gaudelli suggested that a football field will be equipped with enough cameras so viewers can see a 360-degree angle of any play from any place on the field. He also speculated about visuals that we can only dream of right now. Gaudelli says he has spoken with scientists and the conversations turn to, “Could we ever get to the point where we could start digitally removing people from the field to see a clear view of what we want to see?”

“Football is a game where you could have 150 cameras, but if the bodies are aligned a certain way, none of those cameras will have an unobstructed view,” Gaudelli says. “So let’s say we want to see if Ben Roethlisberger broke the plane of the goal line but the view is obstructed by a player. Could we digitally remove that player and then, based on GPS data, recreate Roethlisberger’s body on the plane of the goal line so we can definitely say if the ball did or did not break the plane? That is where I think you will get to, manipulating pictures. There are some countries with high-end defense systems that can do that, and that is where I think it will go.”

Most of the sports television people The MMQB spoke with also predicted the Megacast concept would come to the NFL, a setup in which viewers will have access to numerous add-on features, extra camera angles and announcers geared toward niche broadcasting (i.e. a broadcast featuring the All-22 camera angle and football coaches talking about the game). Aagaard expects networks to have multi-screen capability that can measure anything from how far every player has run on a play to the specific distances between players, to deep, immersive fantasy stats.

“If you look at sports video games, you can zoom in on any one player’s perspective; that will be available in the future,” Aagaard says. “In 10 or 20 years the viewer will have the ability to view the play anyway he wants. Maybe it’s some sort of joystick and he decides if he wants to watch something from the quarterback’s or defensive back’s point of view. The technology will be there. It will just be about the distribution and cost.”

“Where it could be different in 10 years is the placement of cameras,” adds ESPN Monday Night Football announcer Mike Tirico. “Remember the XFL days? Those point-of-view shots from the official or player were jarring. What is to say you can’t put a camera on the field every five yards with a function to see the footwork of lineman? Let’s say a referee calls a roughing the passer penalty. We could see where his eyes are looking, what he is seeing, and he won’t be slowed down with a little lipstick camera on his cap. You need the league to go along with, this but did you think 10 or 15 years ago that we would be able to interview an NBA coach on the floor before the fourth quarter?”

* * *

What will this mean for game broadcasters and the director and producers of NFL telecasts? For starters, you should expect the same cavalcade of former players and coaches to be in the booth. Tirico says he couldn’t envision a time when an NFL television broadcast did not have a coach of former player involved on air.

“The sport, more than any other, is hard to understand because of the complexities of play-calling and the intricacies of 11 people working along the same path,” Tirico says. “It always needs someone to answer why and how.”

Tirico does predict, though, that his job will change (in fact, it already has) because of technology, especially audio. “I am much more conscious now than when I started doing Monday Night Football of the audio of the quarterback at the line of scrimmage. That has gotten much better. There are mics in some of the pads of offensive lineman so you can hear the line calls, and that has impacted how the announcers call the game. If the audio increases, with more players having microphones and more natural sounds, that would be something we’d have to adjust to.”

Cameras are already ubiquitous at games; expect many more of them on future telecasts. (Jeff Moffett/Icon SMI)

Gaudelli ponders whether a woman will come to the forefront and become a play-by-play announcer for NFL telecasts. He also expects, perhaps optimistically, that real-time reporting on television will become more valuable and that access will open up.

“Could I see a day where we start broadcasting practices for the Dallas Cowboys?” Gaudelli says. “Yeah, I do. Will that be national? No. But it could be a local play for the league to generate more revenue and more access for the fans.”

Aagaard says new technology will inundate the behind-the-scenes people in the broadcast truck with many more choices, in a small amount of time. “One of the problems now is to find something,” Aagaard says. “You know you have that great replay, but where is it? There are a lot of decisions for these producers to make, and these decisions are critical. It’s possible that viewers might see things before the producers do if they have access to all the cameras.”

Regarding the auxiliary shows surrounding games, ESPN coordinating producer Seth Markman sees gambling and fantasy football elements becoming much more overt on NFL programming 10 years from now. “I think in 2024 [gambling references] will be commonplace,” says Markman, who runs ESPN’s NFL studio programming. “I don’t think it will be something people tip-toe around. Are we really serving viewers right now by saying the Patriots are going to beat the Jaguars in the game when everyone wants to know if they’ll win by two touchdowns?

If you talk to NFL fans such as Brown and Pace, they expect the home viewing experience to continue to improve, making it a major challenge for teams to convince people to break away from their television utopias and come to the stadium.

“I would imagine in 10 years that something new and innovative will enhance the home-viewing experience,” Puck says. “The NFL has already taken some measures to improve their in-stadium experience, but unless the league can replicate the comforts of my own home, watching multiple games at the same time, being out of the elements, my own refreshments, I am positive I will still be watching at home in 2024 with my wife and 13- and 12-year old sons. And I can speak for certain that they will still be rooting against my team.”

Save for technology, the man cave has changed little over the years. (Getty Images)

-X- · Jun 18, 2014

Prime Time said:
Gordy Brown’s Florida home features a poolside projector screen, religiously tuned to NFL games on Sunday and Monday nights in the fall. (Photo courtesy Gordy Brown)

“I could not imagine weekends without it, especially being a Lions fan and the Fantasy football aspect on top of that,” said Brown, a 27-year-old network administrator for the City of Altamonte Springs, Fla. “The outdoor setup is my baby, my project, and I love it.”

Brown, who grew up in Mayville, Mich., and retains his Wolverine State allegiances, is obviously not alone as a member of the NFL’s Television Nation. Much has been written about how the home-viewing experience has become far superior to the game atmosphere, and in fact you can easily make a compelling argument that television is the most significant football-related object in the lives of NFL fans today. Last year’s opening weekend set of games (Sept. 5-9, 2013) drew 108.4 million viewers, according to the league, the fourth consecutive Kickoff Weekend with a total reach exceeding 105 million viewers.

The conference championship games last January averaged 53.7 million viewers, the most-watched conference championship Sunday in more than 30 years. And despite the blowout nature of Super Bowl XLVIII, the game between Seattle and Denver set a record for the most-watched television show in U.S. history with 111.5 million viewers, topping the previous record of the 111.34 million who watched the 2012 Super Bowl.

Two of those are a football-loving couple in the North Hills area near Pittsburgh who also have distinctive home-viewing setup. Michael Puck, a 32-year-old social media marketer, is a born and bred Bengals fan, and his wife, Erica, is a native of Steeltown and a stay-at-home mother of three-year-old Dylan and two-year-old Austin. The couple have two 75-inch televisions ($4,000 each) mounted side by side on the wall of their basement, a room split between a play area for their young sons and football-watching for the adults.

The couple has a longtime subscription to DirecTV’s Sunday Ticket, and every weekend the television on the left is set to Michael’s Bengals while the one on the right plays Erica’s Steelers. (They also keep helmets of each team below the televisions and own Bengals and Steelers beanbag chairs.) If one team wins and the other loses, the fan of the losing team is charged with making dinner. “We have a friendly rivalry,” says Michael. “But I have conceded that the Steelers are one of the marquee franchises in the NFL. At least I have had some bragging rights the last couple of years.”

Puck had season tickets for the Bengals from 2004 to 2007 when he lived in Indianapolis and made the two-hour drive to Cincinnati for every Bengals home game. But echoing many fans, he said the home experience has become too enjoyable (and too comfortable) for him to keep attending games in person. “I would much rather be at home and watch two games at the same time than fight traffic, pay vending prices and all that kind of stuff,” Puck says. “My in-laws have season tickets to the Steelers, and I will be honest with you: You could not pay me to go to the games.”

* * *

So why does the NFL work so well on television? Part of it is scarcity. Each team plays one game week per week, making the campaign akin to a season-long playoff format. Something Hall of Fame broadcaster John Madden told the Baltimore Sun in 2005 also remains true: The sport is set up to run like episodic television. “It is the perfect sport to televise,” Madden said. “We have change of possession, and there’s a timeout every change of possession, and there’s a commercial.”

Michael and Erica Puck’s Pennsylvania home features side-by-side 75-inch televisions—one for watching Erica’s Steelers and one for Michael’s Bengals. (Photo courtesy Puck family)

History is also a factor. Michael MacCambridge, the author of America’s Game, an expansive history of the NFL that was published in 2004, said that the revenue-sharing agreement the late NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle pushed through Congress and the league’s owners in 1961 is inextricably linked to television’s impact on the sport. The agreement championed by Rozelle removed the financial disparities between teams and became the fiscal engine that drove the NFL’s wealth.

A visionary when it came to the potential of national television, Rozelle convinced the individual league owners of the power of collectivism, persuading them to give up their local television rights in exchange for selling the product as a league-wide package. He brilliantly foresaw television’s power as a growth agent at a time when NFL owners were still of the belief that the primary way to sell their product was through in-home viewing. Today, the network television partners—CBS, Fox, NBC and ESPN—provide the NFL with about $6 billion annually. By 2027, Navigate Research predicts, such media-rights revenues could reach $17 billion, according to USA Today.

“If you have the revenue-sharing agreement without television, you would have teams arguing over when their home games are and who gets to play on Thanksgiving and holidays,” said MacCambridge, who is working on a book about the late Hall of Fame Steelers coach Chuck Noll. “The league would have a piecemeal, small-minded mindset.”

If you want other touchstones involving television that helped build NFL, MacCambridge suggests the iconic 1958 NFL championship game between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants (watched by 45 million Americans and dubbed by SI “The Greatest Game Ever Played”) and the creation of Monday Night Football in 1970. Professional football had become a hot sport in America during the 1960s—Time magazine declared it the sport of that decade—but people still thought Rozelle was crazy for wanting to air pro football in primetime.

ABC originally passed on the Monday night package before signing off on it and airing the program in 1970. “It is the single most influential sports series of all time,” says MacCambridge, “because everything since then followed in the wake—from storylines going into games to keying on certain players.”

From a technology standpoint, Ken Aagaard, an executive vice president of engineering, operations and production services for CBS Sports and a 30-year sports television executive, suggests that instant replay, the first-down line and aerial cameras were key television movers. I’d also add the creation of the mythmaking, artistically brilliant propaganda machine known as NFL Films.

* * *

So what kind of impact will television have on the NFL 10 years from now? There is one surefire lock: You will clearly have a better-looking picture. Ultra high definition television, also known as 4K and 8K viewing, is coming in some form. The technology has at least four times the resolution of current high-definition televisions, and will become more commonplace when the price comes down and broadcasters get more bandwidth for it.

Viewers should also expect graphics and animation to continue to evolve at the pace technology allows it. NBC’s Sunday Night Football producer Fred Gaudelli suggested that a football field will be equipped with enough cameras so viewers can see a 360-degree angle of any play from any place on the field. He also speculated about visuals that we can only dream of right now. Gaudelli says he has spoken with scientists and the conversations turn to, “Could we ever get to the point where we could start digitally removing people from the field to see a clear view of what we want to see?”

“Football is a game where you could have 150 cameras, but if the bodies are aligned a certain way, none of those cameras will have an unobstructed view,” Gaudelli says. “So let’s say we want to see if Ben Roethlisberger broke the plane of the goal line but the view is obstructed by a player. Could we digitally remove that player and then, based on GPS data, recreate Roethlisberger’s body on the plane of the goal line so we can definitely say if the ball did or did not break the plane? That is where I think you will get to, manipulating pictures. There are some countries with high-end defense systems that can do that, and that is where I think it will go.”

Most of the sports television people The MMQB spoke with also predicted the Megacast concept would come to the NFL, a setup in which viewers will have access to numerous add-on features, extra camera angles and announcers geared toward niche broadcasting (i.e. a broadcast featuring the All-22 camera angle and football coaches talking about the game). Aagaard expects networks to have multi-screen capability that can measure anything from how far every player has run on a play to the specific distances between players, to deep, immersive fantasy stats.

“If you look at sports video games, you can zoom in on any one player’s perspective; that will be available in the future,” Aagaard says. “In 10 or 20 years the viewer will have the ability to view the play anyway he wants. Maybe it’s some sort of joystick and he decides if he wants to watch something from the quarterback’s or defensive back’s point of view. The technology will be there. It will just be about the distribution and cost.”

“Where it could be different in 10 years is the placement of cameras,” adds ESPN Monday Night Football announcer Mike Tirico. “Remember the XFL days? Those point-of-view shots from the official or player were jarring. What is to say you can’t put a camera on the field every five yards with a function to see the footwork of lineman? Let’s say a referee calls a roughing the passer penalty. We could see where his eyes are looking, what he is seeing, and he won’t be slowed down with a little lipstick camera on his cap. You need the league to go along with, this but did you think 10 or 15 years ago that we would be able to interview an NBA coach on the floor before the fourth quarter?”

* * *

What will this mean for game broadcasters and the director and producers of NFL telecasts? For starters, you should expect the same cavalcade of former players and coaches to be in the booth. Tirico says he couldn’t envision a time when an NFL television broadcast did not have a coach of former player involved on air.

“The sport, more than any other, is hard to understand because of the complexities of play-calling and the intricacies of 11 people working along the same path,” Tirico says. “It always needs someone to answer why and how.”

Tirico does predict, though, that his job will change (in fact, it already has) because of technology, especially audio. “I am much more conscious now than when I started doing Monday Night Football of the audio of the quarterback at the line of scrimmage. That has gotten much better. There are mics in some of the pads of offensive lineman so you can hear the line calls, and that has impacted how the announcers call the game. If the audio increases, with more players having microphones and more natural sounds, that would be something we’d have to adjust to.”

Cameras are already ubiquitous at games; expect many more of them on future telecasts. (Jeff Moffett/Icon SMI)

Gaudelli ponders whether a woman will come to the forefront and become a play-by-play announcer for NFL telecasts. He also expects, perhaps optimistically, that real-time reporting on television will become more valuable and that access will open up.

“Could I see a day where we start broadcasting practices for the Dallas Cowboys?” Gaudelli says. “Yeah, I do. Will that be national? No. But it could be a local play for the league to generate more revenue and more access for the fans.”

Aagaard says new technology will inundate the behind-the-scenes people in the broadcast truck with many more choices, in a small amount of time. “One of the problems now is to find something,” Aagaard says. “You know you have that great replay, but where is it? There are a lot of decisions for these producers to make, and these decisions are critical. It’s possible that viewers might see things before the producers do if they have access to all the cameras.”

Regarding the auxiliary shows surrounding games, ESPN coordinating producer Seth Markman sees gambling and fantasy football elements becoming much more overt on NFL programming 10 years from now. “I think in 2024 [gambling references] will be commonplace,” says Markman, who runs ESPN’s NFL studio programming. “I don’t think it will be something people tip-toe around. Are we really serving viewers right now by saying the Patriots are going to beat the Jaguars in the game when everyone wants to know if they’ll win by two touchdowns?

If you talk to NFL fans such as Brown and Pace, they expect the home viewing experience to continue to improve, making it a major challenge for teams to convince people to break away from their television utopias and come to the stadium.

“I would imagine in 10 years that something new and innovative will enhance the home-viewing experience,” Puck says. “The NFL has already taken some measures to improve their in-stadium experience, but unless the league can replicate the comforts of my own home, watching multiple games at the same time, being out of the elements, my own refreshments, I am positive I will still be watching at home in 2024 with my wife and 13- and 12-year old sons. And I can speak for certain that they will still be rooting against my team.”

Save for technology, the man cave has changed little over the years. (Getty Images)

Man, I'd never leave that pool area if I had that setup.

Prime Time · Jun 18, 2014

Click the link in the titles to read the whole article.

John DePetro/The MMQB

Bert Bell’s Desk

Walter Iooss Jr./Sports Illustrated

Goalpost on the Goal Line

NFL/Wireimage.com

Ronnie Lott’s Amputated Pinkie Finger

John DePetro/The MMQB

The AFL’s Skinny Football

John DePetro/The MMQB

An Arizona Wranglers USFL Helmet

Pro Football Hall of Fame

Al Davis Telegram Confirming 1967 Willie Brown Trade

John DePetro/The MMQB

Emmitt Smith’s Jersey from Record-Breaking Game

John DePetro/The MMQB

Otto Graham’s 14/60 Jersey

John DePetro/The MMQB

Tom Coughlin’s Call Sheet from Super Bowl XLII

NFL 95: A History of Pro Football in 95 Objects

Legend

PT

Still legal in 17 states!

Moderator

Still legal in 17 states!

Mr. Savant

PT

Still legal in 17 states!

Moderator

PT

Hall of Fame

PT

PT

PT

PT

PT

PT

PT

Medium-sized Lebowski

PT