The Innovator

Paul Brown was such an icon in Ohio that they named a team after him.

After a public vote, Cleveland locals chose to name their new pro football franchise ‘the Browns’ in honour of the coach who’d already delivered four high school national championships, and a college national championship to the state.

While Brown said that coaching Ohio State was the only job that he ever really wanted, ultimately he’d become more recognized for his contributions to pro football.

Here’s a snapshot of just some of the innovations that Paul Brown would introduce to football:

• The modern playbook: he began testing players on their knowledge and using classroom techniques to teach.

• In-helmet communication: he was the first to place a radio in the quarterback’s helmet.

• The coaches’ box: he placed an assistant coach in the press box to collect and communicate information.

• Full-time staff: he was the first to ensure his entire staff were dedicated to football, and didn’t have to work elsewhere to make ends meet in the off-season.

• Breaking the color barrier: he signed two black players, Bill Willis and Marion Motley, in 1946, a year before Jackie Robinson's MLB debut.

• Stay together to stay together: he required players to stay in a hotel together the evening before home and road games.

• The practice squad: he wanted more players to practice, so had the team owner hire them to work in his taxi company. This is where the term ‘taxi squad’ comes from.

He also invented the face mask, the draw play, the 40-yard dash, and the notion of quarterback pocket.

Now, if you know anything about American Football, that’s already an extraordinary contribution. But we haven’t even touched on how much he won once he got to the pros.

Paul Brown won seven pro football titles — four in the AAFC, three in the NFL — and is tied with George Halas as the most successful coach in history.

In third: Bill Belichick with six titles.

But if you’ve followed this newsletter for any length of time, you’ll know that I look to the great coaches of the past not as legends to be celebrated, but as practitioners to be studied. Craft is rooted in skill developed to a high standard, and this is where Paul Brown becomes a particularly interesting study.

“The proper player-coach relationship is the first commandment in my philosophy of football,” Brown writes in his autobiography, published in 1979. Brown says that during a normal day he spent most of his time with his players: in the training room, in his office, in the locker room. “We’d talk about football situations or about their families because I was interested in them and I wanted them to know it,” he writes.

In each of his 25 seasons in pro football, Brown delivered the same opening lecture to his players on the first day of training camp.

“I never left anything to their imagination; I laid out exactly what I expected from them, how I expected them to act on and off the field and what we expected to accomplish each day of the season,” Brown writes.

He continues, with perhaps the most fascinating passage of his book: “I always told them ‘why’ we asked them to do something. I consider this one of the most important principles of coaching.”

“The word ‘why’ appeared more than any other in our playbook,” he says. “Why we work at running. Why we do our routine warmup daily. Why we take calisthenics. Why we practice our daily drills. When we told our players ‘why,’ they were more willing to accept everything we asked them to do.”

We’ve convinced ourselves that relationships, standards, and explaining the why behind our coaching are all modern coaching principles. We have a misguided perception that we found these things recently, or that we’re ahead of the game if we’re doing them now.

Paul Brown was doing them the year after World War 2 ended.

But wait, there’s more…

On his training camp philosophy

“I always strived to make life as natural and as pleasant as possible during those few summer weeks. I thought putting a group of men in the wilderness, cutting them off from their families, was a bit unnatural and unfair to them, and to their families. We sent our players home every weekend after a Saturday practice or preseason game, and they didn't have to report back until Sunday night. I wanted them to keep their families intact, to spend time with their wives and children. Sometimes my wife lived at camp with me because I felt that a woman's presence lent a certain tone to this kind of existence, and our coaches usually had their wives come and visit on Wednesday and join us for dinner. The coaches could also go home on weekends.”

On the highlight of training camp

“The highlight of training camp was the family picnic. We had games for the kids, and I kept a dish of candy on my desk and a few dimes in my top drawer for the kids to find. All this was an effort on my part to show the players and their wives that we valued their friendship. It also helped foster a warm feeling within the team.”

On teaching

“In every camp I applied the basic laws of learning — seeing, hearing, writing, then doing again and again. All the players diagrammed the complete play and wrote their individual assignments in their playbooks. We wanted them to know the play’s complete concept, not just their individual parts.”

On workaholism in coaching

“As a coach I never believed in working into the wee hours of the night. I personally functioned and thought more clearly when I was well rested, and I think a coaching staff does, too. I've heard some professional coaches brag about working eighteen and twenty hours a day, sleeping on cots in their offices, and I've always wondered just how much they really accomplish during all those hours. They must feel insecure because I don't know any of them who has ever won a world championship.”

All of these quotes are tightly nestled away in just five pages of his autobiography.

Bill Belichick once said of Brown, “I really think of him as the father of professional football. Everything that he did as a coach, 50 years later, everybody is still basically doing the same thing."

I’m willing to go a step further. Paul Brown is the father of professional sports.

Whether directly observed through him, or absorbed through his proteges like Don Shula, Chuck Noll, Bud Grant, and Bill Walsh, the technical innovations and modern approaches to coaching highlighted in this article have undoubtedly permeated through world sport.

But here’s the troubling part: you can't even buy Paul Brown's book directly from Amazon. You have to go through secondary retailers.

That's how much seepage there is in our coaching wisdom.

All of this is written down for us, documented first-hand by someone who started coaching almost 100 years ago. We rush to write it off as ‘old school’ and it quietly drifts out of the mainstream, into coaching oblivion.

Then we have to hire expensive consultants and academics to come up with ‘new ideas’ to teach the next generation of coaches. And they just come up with ideas that match the ones we already had.

Instead of looking for new ideas, maybe we should be looking for old ideas.