The British have an expression for it. An expression, so I have read, that is frequently heard reverberating in the houses of Parliament during contentious debates over public policy: We beg to differ!
In researching this book, I came across two comments from the dust jackets of books written within the past few years about the undefeated 1972 Super Bowl champion Miami Dolphins. From the book Undefeated: Inside the 1972 Miami Dolphins Perfect Season, author Mike Freeman states, “Each year, every football team sets out to play a perfect season. Only one has ever succeeded.”
From the jacket of the book Perfection: The Inside Story of the 1972 Miami Dolphins Perfect Season, written by Dolphins Hall of Fame quarterback Bob Griese with Dave Hyde, comes the claim, “1972 was the year of the Dolphin. That Miami team has done what no other has done, before or since: they won every regular season game and followed that feat with a perfect playoff run and a Super Bowl championship.”
We beg to differ! “We” being fans of the Cleveland Browns, whose 1948 edition won every regular season game and the championship game of their league, the All-America Football Conference. There was no Super Bowl for the Browns to win, although they would have welcomed the chance to meet the champions of the National Football League, the Philadelphia Eagles, to determine who reigned supreme in professional football. The Eagles were interested. The NFL wasn’t, and without the approval of the league as a whole, there could be no showdown.
The year 1948 was a magical one for sports fans in my hometown of Cleveland. A city that hasn’t won a “world’s championship” in any major professional sport in exactly half a century as this book is written boasted of being America’s “city of champions.”
The Cleveland Barons of the American Hockey League opened the year by winning the Calder Cup title in April. The National Hockey League consisted of the “original six” teams (Detroit, New York, Montreal, Boston, Toronto and Chicago) in 1948. This was long before the AHL became a feeder system for the NHL. Cleveland’s players were its own, not players it was developing for a parent club in the NHL. Many of the players would wind up there, however, as selling player contracts to the major league was one way for AHL teams to make money. The Barons had been invited to join the NHL more than once. They were often referred to as “the seventh best team in hockey.” They played in a modern arena near the city’s downtown area that seated 10,000 fans. Cleveland was the sixth largest city in the United States and was geographically close to the six NHL clubs. The Barons didn’t ask for admittance, they were invited to join. Owner Al Sutphin had it too good in the AHL and rejected the overtures.
Just as the Barons finished their championship season, the Cleveland Indians started theirs and put together a campaign for the ages. After finishing a mediocre fourth in 1947, owner Bill Veeck infuriated the team’s fans by trying to trade the team’s best, and most popular, player, shortstop Lou Boudreau, who also happened to be the manager. The St. Louis Browns backed out of the deal, which would have sent shortstop Vern Stephens to Cleveland in exchange for Boudreau. But that didn’t stop Veeck, the greatest showman in baseball history, from making a grandiose, and totally phony, display of bowing to pressure from the public and nixing a deal that, unbeknownst to the fans, had already been nixed. Veeck then signed Boudreau to a two-year contract.
Veeck admired Boudreau’s talent on the field (who didn’t?) but wasn’t sold on him as a manager, and considered replacing him with Al Lopez in the dugout. Boudreau responded with an MVP season. Despite the Boudreau miscalculation, Veeck otherwise rolled nothing but sevens. The addition of rookie pitcher Gene Bearden, a 20-game winner who proved to be one of baseball’s great one-year wonders, and outfielder Larry Doby, the first African American player in the American League and a future Hall of Famer, helped the Tribe battle the Boston Red Sox (who acquired Stephens from St. Louis) and New York Yankees down to the season’s final day in the tightest pennant race the AL had produced in 40 years. Veeck was widely ridiculed for signing ageless Negro League pitcher Leroy (Satchel) Paige in mid-season to bolster the Tribe’s staff. Most saw it as another of Veeck’s crazy publicity stunts, but the 42-year-old Paige (at least, Veeck said he was 42, though there was speculation that he was much older) posted a 6–1 record for the Indians and drew huge crowds when he pitched both at home and on the road. Cleveland and Boston finished tied for the lead, and the Indians, led by Bearden’s pitching and Boudreau’s four hits, two of which were home runs, beat the Red Sox, 8–3, in Fenway Park in the league’s first-ever playoff game. The six-game victory over the Boston Braves in the World Series was almost an anti-climax. A major league record 2,620,627 fans (plus an additional 238,491 in the World Series) poured through the turnstiles of Cleveland Municipal Stadium to watch the drama. The Indians haven’t won a World Series since, and have played in only three of them. Veeck is in the Hall of Fame, and his name is still spoken with reverence in Cleveland.
Then it was the Browns’ turn. The Indians were an almost impossible act to follow, but the Browns managed to accomplish just that by putting together the first undefeated, untied league championship season in the modern history of professional football. I’ve chosen to define the modern era as beginning in 1933, when the National Football League split into divisions and pitted the winners of those divisions against each other in a season-concluding championship game. Also by 1933, the NFL had abandoned all but two of the small town teams that characterized it in its formative years of the 1920s. The Portsmouth, Ohio, Spartans would compete in the NFL in 1933, then move to Detroit in 1934. The Green Bay Packers would remain.
The Browns were no strangers to championships. They were born in 1945, when sportswriter Arch Ward created the All-America Football Conference to compete with the NFL. Coached by and named after Paul Brown, the team won AAFC titles in 1946 and 1947. Unfortunately, the Browns’ 15–0 record in 1948 has been buried beneath the sands of time, and isn’t even recognized by the NFL, which thumbed its nose at the AAFC and to this day refuses to acknowledge that the league ever existed. As far as the NFL is concerned, the 1972 Dolphins are the only team to win all of its games, including the championship game, in pro football history. Denying there’s an elephant in the room, however, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
The Browns were the first team to earn an undefeated, untied league championship season, though most of their fans don’t know it. Some who are aware of it, and many football fans and historians in general, question its legitimacy since it was achieved in the AAFC, which fans simply assume had to be an inferior league. It would eventually fold, as had the three leagues that came before it (in 1926, 1936 and 1940), attempting to challenge the NFL for the attention and affection of the nation’s football fans. Technically, the AAFC merged with the NFL, but not in the way the American Football League merged with the NFL in 1966. The NFL accepted all of the AFL’s teams into the fold. In 1949, the NFL absorbed the Browns, San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Colts. These Colts were not the same Colts who became one of the NFL’s strongest teams by the late 1950s and winners of the 1958 overtime championship game against the New York Giants, the game largely credited today with making professional football the nation’s most popular sport. These Colts were punching bags for one miserable season in the NFL before disbanding. The four remaining AAFC franchises folded, and their players were distributed among the NFL teams.
The question of how the AAFC stacked up against its older, established rival is beyond the scope of this book, and has been explored in detail elsewhere. In the book The Best Show in Football: The Cleveland Browns 1946–1955, which was a valuable reference for me as this book was written, author Andy Piascik makes a compelling argument that the AAFC was the stronger of the two leagues. Part of that argument is the fact that when the Browns joined the NFL in 1950, they stomped its champion, the Philadelphia Eagles, 35–10, in their first game and went on to win the league championship. They played for the league championship their first six seasons in the NFL, something no existing team had ever done (or come close to doing), and won it in 1950, ’54 and ’55. The Browns lost a fourth title when they blew a six-point lead with 2:08 to play and lost to the Detroit Lions, 17–16, in 1953. Not bad for a refugee from an inferior league.
Since its demise after the 1949 season, football historians have debated whether the dominance of Brown’s Browns was directly responsible for the collapse of the All-America Football Conference, which began with such promise. Although the AAFC had other problems, the lack of competition caused by the Browns’ overwhelming strength was atop the list of factors that forced it to surrender to the NFL in December of 1949. By the AAFC’s fourth and final season, it was a foregone conclusion that the Browns were going to win every week. Fans in other league cities had no incentive to buy tickets to watch their teams fight it out for second place. The AAFC, led by the Browns, had broken professional football’s color barrier and drew more fans to its games than the NFL in both 1946 and ’47. But those attendance figures dwindled significantly in 1948, even in Cleveland, where the Browns were proving virtually unbeatable. In the four-season history of the AAFC, the Browns lost only four games. Their brilliance was something to behold, but it understandably caused fans of the other AAFC teams to lose interest. With their 31–28 victory over the Chicago Rockets on October 19, 1947, the Browns launched a 29-game unbeaten streak, which has never been exceeded or equaled. From October of 1947 until October of 1949, the Browns won 27 games, tied two, and lost none.
Within that streak was the unbeaten and untied championship season of 1948. Cleveland’s journey to the 1948 AAFC title was no cakewalk. The Browns didn’t clinch their division until the season’s 13th game, thanks to the excellence of the San Francisco 49ers, who chased them down to the wire and may well have been the second best team in all of professional football (NFL included) with their 12–2 record, both losses administered by the Browns, by a total of 10 points. Coach Brown made the journey more difficult when he agreed to a hare-brained experiment concocted by Branch Rickey, the Hall of Fame Brooklyn baseball executive who also ran Brooklyn’s team in the AAFC. Rickey thought it would be a great idea for a team to play three games in eight days on both coasts, and the Browns, as the league’s flagship franchise and premier drawing card, were offered up as the guinea pigs. Brown had the clout within the AAFC to have refused, but, against his better judgment, he accepted the assignment. The Browns defied the odds and won all three games.
Since the NFL split into divisions and matched the winners of those divisions in a championship game in 1933, five professional teams have navigated their regular seasons without a loss: the 1934 Chicago Bears (13–0), the 1942 Bears (11–0), the Browns (14–0), the Dolphins (14–0), and the 2007 New England Patriots (16–0). The Bears were beaten by the New York Giants in the 1934 title game, and by the Washington Redskins in 1942. The Giants, losers of six games during the 2007 regular season, including a 38–35 loss to New England in the year’s final contest, also spoiled the Patriots’ dream of becoming the second undefeated and untied Super Bowl champion. Only Cleveland and Miami have been able to run the table.
The Browns’ monumental accomplishment in 1948 shouldn’t be discounted, or dismissed altogether, because they played in what may (or may not) have been an inferior league. Here’s how they won all 15 of their games and their third straight AAFC championship.