The NFL record book is about to be rewritten and Paul Brown, perhaps the most influential coach in modern football history, will be the biggest winner.
For 75 years, the exploits of those who played and coached in a long-defunct professional football league that was an early rival to the NFL have been mostly ignored, lost in the explosion of interest in statistics and the merger of the AFL and NFL.
Two decades before the vaunted merger of 1969 that created the modern NFL, the All-America Football Conference, an earlier competitor of the NFL, went out of business at the end of the 1949 season. Three of its teams – the Cleveland Browns, San Francisco 49ers and the original Baltimore Colts – joined the NFL for the start of the 1950 season and a fourth team, the New York Yanks, was essentially a spin-off of some players that had been part of the AAFC team, the New York Yankees. The rest of the teams folded. Despite those links with the NFL, all the records for every team and player from the four years the AAFC existed disappeared, unacknowledged in the NFL's record books.
Until now.
Included in the Competition Committee report to NFL owners in advance of the Annual League Meeting was notice that the statistics from the AAFC -- players, coaches and teams -- will finally be incorporated into the NFL's official records, just as the AFL records were incorporated into the NFL's record when the merger was completed. The report was officially approved by the owners in Palm Beach on Tuesday.
The AAFC was no minor league. Seventeen men who coached or played in the AAFC are in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, including Brown and players like Otto Graham, Y.A. Tittle and Marion Motley. No one seems to know why the records did not carry over to the NFL at the time of the AAFC's demise, although a long-ago note in the NFL's record and fact book stated that official scoresheets were not available for the AAFC.
That note, though, hasn't appeared since the 1980s. A move to include the AAFC's statistics picked up steam in 2019, when the NFL celebrated its 100th anniversary and dove deep into its history. That effort stalled when COVID-19 struck in 2020, and everyone's attention was diverted to merely getting through the season. But the push was recently revived and more data was uncovered. In 1949, the AAFC published a statistical record that included single game records for all four seasons and the game scoresheets have been recovered. The NFL league office conducted a review and, after consulting with the Elias Sports Bureau and the Pro Football Hall of Fame, it decided it was time to correct the oversight.
The most significant adjustment will be to Brown's coaching record. In the 2024 NFL record and fact book, Brown is credited with 21 seasons, 166 regular season wins, four postseason wins (for a career total of 170 wins) and three championships. But Brown coached the Cleveland Browns to the championship in every one of the AAFC's four seasons. He won 47 regular season games in the AAFC, and five additional postseason games. His career total, then, should be 222 victories and seven overall championships. The 222 victories will vault him up the all-time wins list. In the 2024 NFL record and fact book, Brown was in 21st place. With the AAFC adjustment, he will be in seventh place, just behind Curly Lambeau, who had 229 overall victories, and just ahead of Chuck Noll, with 209. Given Brown's outsized influence on coaching -- he is credited with, among other things, beginning the practice of using film analysis to grade players and calling plays from the sideline -- it is hard to imagine anyone quibbling with Brown's new rank.
Among the other changes: Marion Motley will now be fourth on the list of highest career rushing average with 5.7 yards per carry. Ahead of him are Michael Vick (7.0), Randall Cunningham (6.4) and Lamar Jackson (6.1). And the San Francisco 49ers of 1948 amassed 3,663 yards rushing, which puts them in first place all-time over the 2019 Baltimore Ravens, who had 3,296 rushing yards. The 1948 49ers averaged 6.1 yards per run in 1948, which will also put them in first place, just ahead of the 2024 Ravens, who averaged 5.8 yards per carry.
