Grossi: NFL has forgotten Paul Brown

[HoosierCat]

http://espncleveland.com/common/more.php?m=49&action=blog&r=17&post_id=42461

Hard to argue with that. Includes some good commentary from Mike.

[HoosierCat]

NFL Network pulls head out of ass, is producing an episode of "A Football Life" on PB.

/>http://espncleveland.com/common/more.php?m=49&action=blog&r=17&post_id=45491

I especially loved this nugget:

“Creatively, it’s very tough to make a film about a story that (happened) before the 1950s because you have a limited amount of footage,” Zender said. “A lot of creative challenges are associated with it.”

For instance, there is no NFL Films footage of Brown coaching the Browns. Zender was limited to primitive newsreel highlights of the great Browns teams originating in the All-America Football Conference in the late 1940s and the NFL in the 1950s.

But his research did uncover some rare film footage from Brown’s years at Massillon Washington High School in the late 1930s and also in the AAFC in the 1940s – all of which was obviously authorized, if not commissioned, by Brown.

“Some of the Massillon high school games are in 35mm. It’s astonishing,” Zender said. “That’s just first-class, state-of-the-art – like movies of that time.”

Brown’s image was that of a myopic football coach who was only devoted to winning games – not to selling tickets. Yet he had a keen sense of selling the AAFC Browns as a first-class operation and he apparently devoted some effort into recording his team for posterity sake.

“The interesting thing about Paul Brown,” Zender said, “is that Browns highlights films in the AAFC were way ahead of any football team’s highlight films at the time. Browns highlights films in the 1940s were in all color. NFL teams didn’t catch up until the 1960s.

So PB was NFL Films before there was an NFL Films. Why am I not surprised?

[COB]

No kidding. Paul Brown was quite an innovator.