Paul Eugene Brown (September 7, 1908 – August 5, 1991) was an American football coach and executive in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC), the National Football League (NFL), and the American Football League (AFL). Brown was both the co-founder and first coach of the Cleveland Browns, a team named after him, and later co-founded the Cincinnati Bengals. His teams won seven league championships in a professional coaching career spanning 25 seasons.
Brown began his coaching career at Severn School in 1931 before becoming the head football coach at Massillon Washington High School in Massillon, Ohio, where he grew up. His high school teams lost only 10 games in 11 seasons. He was then hired at Ohio State University and coached the school to its first national football championship in 1942. After World War II, he became head coach of the Browns, who won all four AAFC championships before joining the NFL in 1950. Brown coached the Browns to three NFL championships — in 1950, 1954 and 1955 — but was fired in January 1963 amid a power struggle with team owner Art Modell. In 1968, Brown co-founded and was the first coach of the Bengals. He retired from coaching in 1975 but remained the Bengals' team president until his death in 1991. The Bengals named their home stadium Paul Brown Stadium in his honor. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1967.
Brown is credited with a number of American football innovations. He was the first coach to use game film to scout opponents, hire a full-time staff of assistants, and test players on their knowledge of a playbook. He invented the modern face mask, the practice squad and the draw play. He also played a role in breaking professional football's color barrier, bringing the first African-Americans to play pro football in the modern era onto his teams. Despite these accomplishments, Brown was not universally liked. He was strict and controlling, which often brought him into conflict with players who wanted a greater say in play-calling. These disputes, combined with Brown's failure to consult Modell on major personnel decisions, led to his firing as the Browns' coach in 1963.
On April 1, 2025, the NFL announced All-America Football Conference records and statistics will be recognized in its official records. This bumped Paul Brown to seventh place on the NFL's all-time head coaches wins list.
Early life Brown grew up in Massillon, Ohio, where he moved with his family from Norwalk when he was nine years of age. His father, Lester, was a dispatcher for the Wheeling and Lake Erie Railroad. Massillon was a shipping and steel town obsessed with its high school and professional football teams, both called the Tigers. Massillon's main rival at both levels was nearby Canton, a bigger and richer city. When the professional teams folded in the 1920s, the rivalry between the high school teams took center stage.
Brown entered Massillon Washington High School in 1922. Although he played football as a child, Brown was undersized for the game at less than 150 pounds and at first focused his athletic energies on the pole vault. Harry Stuhldreher, who went on to be one of Notre Dame's legendary Four Horsemen, was then the high school quarterback. But Massillon coach Dave Stewart saw Brown's determination to be a good vaulter despite his small size and brought him onto the football team; as a junior in 1924, he took over as the starting quarterback. Massillon posted a win–loss record of 15–3 in Brown's junior and senior years as the starter.
Brown graduated in 1925 and enrolled at Ohio State University the following year, hoping to make the Buckeyes team. He never got past the tryout phase. After his freshman year, he transferred to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he followed Weeb Ewbank as the school's starting quarterback. Under Coach Chester Pittser, Brown was named to the All-Ohio small-college second team by the Associated Press at the end of 1928. In two seasons at Miami, Brown guided the team to a 14–3 record. He was a member of the Kappa chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon. He married his high school sweetheart, Katie Kester, the following year. Brown had taken pre-law at Miami and considered studying history on a Rhodes Scholarship, but after college he instead took his first job as a coach. On Stewart's recommendation, Severn School, a private prep school in Maryland, hired him in 1930.
High school coaching career
Severn School Brown spent two very successful years at Severn. The team was undefeated in his first season and won the Maryland state championship. In 1931, the team's win-loss-tie record was 5–2–1. Brown's overall record was 12–2–1. After his second year, Massillon's head coaching job became available, and Brown took the position.
Massillon Tigers
Brown returned to Massillon in 1932, when he was 24 years old and barely two years out of college. His assignment was to turn around a Tigers team that had fallen into mediocrity over the six seasons since the departure of Stewart, Brown's old coach. In 1931, the year before Brown arrived, the Tigers finished with a 2–6–2 record. Brown's strategy was to build up a disciplined, hard-working team. He fired an assistant early on for arriving at a practice late because he had to work on his farm. No Tigers player was allowed to sit on the bench during a game; Brown made them stand. At Massillon, Brown put in an offense and blocking scheme he learned from Duke's Jimmy DeHart and Purdue's Noble Kizer. He emphasized quickness over strength.
In his first season at Massillon, Brown's team posted a 5–4–1 record, better than the previous year but far from Brown's exacting standards. The Tigers improved again in 1933, ending with an 8–2 record but losing to their chief rivals, the Canton McKinley High School Bulldogs. In 1934, Massillon won all of its games until a 21–6 defeat to McKinley in the final game of the season. As the pressure on Brown grew to turn the tables on McKinley, Massillon finally accomplished the feat the following year in an undefeated season, the first of several with Brown at the helm.
By then, Brown had put his system into place: a strict, systematic approach to coaching combined with a well-organized recruitment network that drew promising young players from Massillon's junior high school football program. He paid no attention to race, and brought several African-American players onto the team at a time when many northern schools excluded them.
In the ensuing five seasons, Massillon lost only one game, a 7–0 defeat at New Castle, Pennsylvania, in 1937 after several players came down with the flu. As the Tigers' prestige grew, Brown in 1936 convinced the school to build a new stadium almost triple the size of the existing 7,000-seat facility. The stadium was finished in 1939, and is now named after Brown. The pinnacle of Brown's career at Massillon was a victory in the 1940 season against Toledo's Waite High School. The Tigers and Waite both went undefeated in the 1939 season, and both claimed the state championship. The teams decided to settle the score the following year, and Brown's team won 28–0. The Massillon 1940 squad is still regarded by historians as one of the best in the history of state high school football. In a pre-season scrimmage, the Massillon Tigers played the Kent State University Golden Flashes, and defeated the older college team 47–0.
During his nine years at Massillon, Brown invented the playbook, a detailed listing of formations and set plays, and tested his players on their knowledge of it. He also originated the practice of sending in plays to his quarterback from the sideline using hand signals. His overall record at the school was 80–8–2, including a 35-game winning streak. Between 1935 and 1940, the team won the state football championship five times and won the High School Football National Championship four times, outscoring opponents by 2,393 points to 168 over that span. After the early losses to Canton, the Tigers beat the Bulldogs six straight times.
Brown's legacy in Massillon is still honored to this day: the Tiger teams wear his initials on the front shoulder of their uniforms, and a portrait of Brown is permanently displayed on the scoreboard of Paul Brown Tiger Stadium.
College and military career
Ohio State Buckeyes Brown's success at Massillon raised his profile in Ohio considerably; people started calling him the "Miracle Man of Massillon." When Ohio State was looking for a new coach in 1940 – Francis Schmidt left after losing to the rival Michigan Wolverines three times in a row – Brown was a candidate for the job. Ohio State officials were skeptical about the 33-year-old making the transition to college football but were worried that they might lose talented high school recruits loyal to Brown if they did not sign him.
Ohio State offered Brown a $6,500 salary ($ in dollars), about $1,500 above his Massillon pay. He accepted in January 1941 and immediately began to institute his rigorous system. Players were drilled and quizzed, and Brown focused on preparing the freshmen to take starting roles as graduating seniors left. He conditioned his players to emphasize quickness, adopting the 40-yard dash as a measure of speed because that was the distance players needed to run to cover a punt.
Brown's first year at Ohio State was a success. The Buckeyes won six of eight games in 1941; the only loss was to Northwestern University and its star quarterback, Otto Graham. The final game of the season was a 20–20 tie with Michigan, which the school's supporters saw as a good outcome given that Ohio State was a heavy underdog. The Buckeyes tied for second place in the Western Conference, a grouping of college teams from the Midwestern United States (now known as the Big Ten), and finished 13th in the AP Poll. Brown was fourth in balloting for national Coach of the Year.
Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, threatened to derail the 1942 season, but most college teams played on, adjusting schedules to include military teams composed of players serving in the military. The Buckeyes opened the season by beating a Fort Knox team 59–0, followed by two more wins against Southern California and Indiana University. In the first AP Poll of the season, Ohio State was ranked best in the nation, the first time the school had achieved that mark. The 1942 team was the first composed mainly of players hand-picked by Brown, including Bill Willis, Dante Lavelli and star halfback Les Horvath. In the middle of the season, the Buckeyes lost to the University of Wisconsin after numerous players drank bad water and got sick. That was the team's only loss of the season, which culminated with a 21–7 victory over Michigan. The Buckeyes won the Western Conference and claimed their first-ever national title after finishing the season at the top of the AP Poll.
The 1943 season was a disaster for Brown and the Buckeyes. Depleted by the military draft and facing tough competition from teams on Army and Navy bases, Brown was forced to play 17-year-old recruits who had not yet enlisted. Ohio State had affiliated itself with the Army Specialized Training Program, which did not allow its trainees to participate in varsity sports, while schools such as Michigan and Purdue became part of the Navy's V-12 training program, which did. The Buckeyes ended with a 3–6 record. In three seasons at Ohio State, Brown amassed an 18–8–1 record.
Great Lakes Bluejackets