Cleveland Browns vs. Detroit Lions: The 1954 Championship Showdown

1954 is no exception to this.

This is the Pigskin Daily History Dispatch, a podcast that covers the anniversaries of American football events throughout history.

Your host, Darren Hayes is podcasting from America's North Shore to bring you the memories of the gridiron one day at a time.

Hello, my football friends.

This is Darren Hayes of pigskindispatch.com welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history.

And welcome to our championship series.

Man, are we having a great time talking to experts about the National Football League championships before the super bowl.

And some great teams, some great players, some great items of historic interest in the game of football in a National Football League.

And that is no exception.

He's a returning guest and I'm embarrassed to say it's been four years since we have had Jonathan Knight here in the pig pen.

Jonathan, welcome back to the Pig pen.

Thank you, Darren.

It's great to be back.

Jonathan, you have, you know, I think we counted before we talked that you have five books on the Cleveland Browns history and definitely qualified to talk about this 54 team which is at the.

The pinnacle of probably the Browns seasons.

You know, this is a great team that they have in the 50s and great run that they have.

Paul Brown's Ghost.

Yeah, that, that was a while ago.

You know, just kind of like figuring out the next project.

I did have another book come out not related to the Browns or sports, ironically about the totally out of left field, out of.

Related to the coincidences between the Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy ass destinations.

So very, very much a left turn, but a very.

It was a lot of fun to do, just kind of exploring that something that I've always been interested in.

So that came out I think two years ago, two or three years ago.

In the meantime, just kind of noodling between projects, figuring out what's going to come next.

Yeah, I, I hear you.

There's so much out there to write about, so many interesting things.

And definitely that Kennedy and Lincoln coincidences are very interesting.

So I have to make sure I get a copy of that.

I love that kind of stuff.

That's good stuff.

And readers, we will get some links in the show notes of both YouTube and on the podcast notes and on pigskindispatch.com get you hooked up into Jonathan's work and get his books, including the one he just talked about and some of these Cleveland Browns books we're going to be talking about here, I'm sure in a few minutes.

This is kind of a unique situation because I don't think it's ever happened before or since where the same two teams met in a championship game in the National Football League three times in a row.

It's happened twice before, but three times.

And that's what we have here in 54.

Yeah.

And it really defined the whole decade.

This was a dueling dynasty.

Like which one was going to be the team of the 50s?

And the irony of this is, was while they were both great teams and memorable games, the Lions just had the Browns number throughout the decade.

Whether it was championships, they won three of the four or even in the regular season.

The Browns just could not beat the lines.

They could beat everybody else.

They just couldn't beat the lines.

Yeah, it definitely was.

And we're not sure what happened that year in between that 55 because neither team made the championship and then they both returned a year later.

I'm sorry, 50.

55 or 56.

56 is when the Giants win.

Yeah.

So it's interesting that they must have took a year off.

They got too tired from playing all those games and I need a rest.

Must be wanting to give somebody else a chance.

Yeah, that's the way the National Football League team.

It's very democratic.

Right, right.

So what can you tell us about the 54 season?

What's sort of the temperature of the league at this time?

Well, it's interesting for the, for the Browns specifically because as you mentioned, they, they had on run, you know, through 54, that joining the.

What happened that impact, which is amazing, like you Talk about three teams or teams meeting three straight years in the championship that.

I mean, we will never see that.

We will never see a team reach their championship 10 straight years.

This would have been the ninth of those of those 10 years.

The next three years, they knocked on the door and just couldn't win, lost close games to the Rams in 51, the Lions in 52, and then again in 53.

So they, they, while certainly impressive, certainly successful, they were not a dynasty.

Like, they were not yet poised to be what we remembered them as in the 50s.

They, in a way, they were kind of a disappointment, at least those last three years, coming right up on the cusp of winning championships with some really good teams.

A lot of the, of the, of the guys that had led them those first two years and even in.

In the 40s in the all America League had retired or been traded.

It was a transitional year.

And it was.

The expectations were maybe a little bit lower.

Certainly there was an understanding that this was not going to be one of the great Browns teams that had preceded.

So there was certainly an expectation of success because there had been nothing else with this team.

But at the same time, it was.

Well, this is sort of probably the twilight of this run.

And going into that season, nobody really knew what they were going to see.

And what they saw very early on was a disappointment.

They lost two of their first three games.

And I'm very intimate with this subject.

But the Indians that year set an American League record for victories in a season with 111 in 154.

Game season cruise to the American League pennant, were expected to go on and conquer the World Series and start their own dynasty, stunningly got swept by the New York Giants in the World Series, defined by Willie May's great catch.

Everyone's always seen that.

And that sort of was the end of the Indians.

For about 40 years, we didn't see them but all of that by way of saying that what, what, how that affected the Browns was as the Indians went on this run, they went into the World Series.

That first weekend in October would have been week two of the NFL season.

The Indians would be hosting games three, four and five of the World Series that weekend.

And the Browns were scheduled to host the Detroit Lions in week two of the NFL season.

The Browns had started in week one getting blown out by a Philadelphia team that by all appearances did not appear to be anything special.

Sort of underlining the general thought that this Browns team wasn't going to be that good.

And now all of a sudden they've got to play the two time defending world champions the next weekend.

And it didn't look great.

02 looked very, very promising.

It looked like that was going to happen.

But with the Indians now hosting the World Series, the decision was made.

Okay, we got to, we can't do this.

We can't have a World Series game and an NFL game in the same stadium.

Remember this is back in the days when the Browns and the Indians shared Cleveland Stadium.

We can't do both in the same day.

We need to kick this Browns Lions game to the end of the year.

So they tacked it on to the end of the schedule and that in some ways might have saved the Browns.

Like had they lost that game, they would have been Owen 2.

They wound up coming back the following week and winning against the Chicago Cardinals, then lost again badly in their, in their, what was their third game, got blown out by the Pittsburgh Steelers.

So in reality they were 1 and 2.

They very likely could have been 1 and 3 and then perhaps the bottom would have fallen out.

Like that would have been too deep a hole for them to dig out of.

So by kicking that game to the bottom of the schedule, it gave them just a little bit of wig room.

So they lost two of those first three, righted the ship, won eight in a row, and then played what turned out to be a meaningless game at the end of the season.

Both the Lions and Browns had clinched their division and respected divisions and knew they were going to be playing one another the following week in the NFL Championship.

So it was really a meaningless game at the very end of the season.

They did lose the game to finish the season at 9 3.

But at that point, no harm done.

Like it really didn't matter.

But had that game been earlier, had that been been scheduled or had been played when it was scheduled, who knows?

Like that might have really dropped the bottom out of the season and the irony of the whole story is that the Indians, as I mentioned, were swept by the Giants, losing game four on Saturday, game five on Sunday.

Nothing happened at Cleveland Stadium, so they could have played that game all.

All along.

And it may have changed the course of the entire Browns championship season.

Yeah, I tell you, I think they had a percentage recently.

And there's a lot more teams going into postseason now than there was then.

Only two back then.

So the season was much shorter.

We're talking about 12 game seasons back then.

So you lose your first four, you've dug yourself.

All 25% of your games are losses now.

Exactly.

And even at one and two, at that point, Philadelphia was four and one, the Giants were three and one.

So they were two, two, two and a half games out of first place with a quarter of the season gone.

And that's.

That's tough ground to make up in football.

Yeah.

And if you sit there and think about it, I mean, if that schedule holds true, those are the two teams that the Browns who have been in, you know, three straight NFL championships at that point.

Three, you know, before the 54 season.

Those are their two opponents, the.

The Lions and the.

The Eagles are who they played in their championship.

NFL championship game.

So that's pretty tough way to start out, even though the Eagles are, you know, three years removed from their last championship appearance.

So that's a tough sled to go here for.

They must have made the scheduler a little bit upset.

Who's.

Burt Bell?

I think at that time.

I think he.

That's right.

Yeah, that's right.

In the early 50s.

Yeah.

I.

We had an opportunity to talk to his son Upton on a couple occasions, and Upton would recant how his father would put papers all over the kitchen, hang them on the wall.

That's how he did the NFL schedule.

He'd just be writing all over the place.

And I love hearing this.

Yeah, so I love hearing those stories.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Pretty.

Pretty cool thing.

So.

Who are the guys they count on?

Well, you know, first and foremost, you talk with.

But Autogram.

I mean, he was certainly the star of the team, the best player.

He was the franchise quarterback in an era that it really was not about quarterbacks.

There were stars, but the football was as.

As you.

And obviously Your listeners know it was very, very different back then.

And certainly by looking at the statistics, it was.

There was a lot of numbers that aren't going to blow your mind.

They're not really comparable to what we see today or even what we saw 20 or 30 years ago.

But Otto Graham was no doubt about it.

As we mentioned before, like you, you play 10 years, you play in 10 championships.

That's remarkable.

I mean, that had.

No quarterback has ever done that.

No quarterback ever will do that.

So he was very much the Tom Brady of his day.

So you start with him.

He had been there since the beginning.

He was absolutely the heart of the team.

The irony is, as I mentioned before, like a lot of the guys who had been the signature people for the Browns the last.

The previous few years were gone.

Mary Motley had.

Had gone.

So at this point, you still had, you still had recognizable names.

Of course there were talented players.

Ray Renfro, Dub Jones, Lou Groza, of course, was still around.

He still had many years to go in his wonderful career.

So it was very much.

It was a, it was a lunch bucket type of, type of team.

And, and they got the job done and won not so much with individual stardom or individual statistics or even offense, like they won with defense.

They were a very, very gritty, very dirty team that did what they needed to do and got the job done.

Yeah, that's, I mean, remarkable names that you say there.

It's, you know, basically the, the walls of Canton that you're, you're talking about there with those stars.

And, you know, the Lions are equally talented, you know, to play in three straight championships.

You have to have some star power on that side too.

And they're, they're well coached, they have a strong quarterback, they have good offense, a fair defense, and, you know, very.

Two formidable foes playing in this championship game.

Yeah, and really cool too, that it was very much a battle of Lake Erie, like very much an Ohio team against the Michigan team.

Detroit and Cleveland, you know, stones throw away from each other that these were the, the powerhouses of football in the heart of the Midwest.

I mean, that was really cool.

You really got to see that.

And it genuinely was a rivalry.

Like just the cities alone were a rivalry.

And of course, the teams just took that to another level.

Yeah, I guess I never really thought about that.

The Ohio Michigan rivalry we have in college and now you have on a professional level three years in a row.

That is kind of a cool aspect of it.

You know, there was kind of an interesting thing.

I'm a former football official, so I always try to look at the rules and some rules that impacted and the big rule, which doesn't sound all that important, but it's the first year that the National Football League allowed the offense to ask for a new football on a rainy day or muddy field and which I'm sure had some impact back in the season because nobody played on Astroturf, nobody played on carpet.

It was all grass mud.

Cleveland's case.

I'm sure it was.

Yeah.

The mud.

Playing in the infield of the Indians.

I know going to the Cleveland municipal in the 70s when I was a kid to watch a.

And the infield was definitely there all football season.

So some.

Just an interesting aspect to throw in there that the NFL did that after all those years of playing the way they did with one football and whenever the officials decided to change it.

Yeah, that's interesting.

Yeah.

These little things that you hear about changes in that we just never either never think about or just never really considered like.

Yeah, there was a time when that wasn't the case.

Same in baseball.

Like changing the baseball out.

Like now we see it all the time, but there was a time when you'd use one ball for the whole game.

We wouldn't be switching them out.

Right.

And it sounds silly to us now.

Why wouldn't you do that?

You know?

Yeah.

Right.

But that's different.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's definitely.

So.

So who was the competition?

You know, the.

The NFL is broken into two divisions or conferences.

I'm not sure what they called them then.

They kept changing the names of them constantly throughout the 40s and 50s.

But who is the.

The Browns major competition in the East.

So it.

And that's, as I mentioned before, like Philadelphia kind of surprised folks, like came out of.

Came out of the woodwork a little bit.

Got off to a great start.

Started 4.0-which I think lot of people and.

And.

And early on thought, well, wow, this might be a.

A changing of the guard.

They.

They tailed off as the season went on.

The Giants, of course, the other big team of the 50s, they were right there.

They wound up, I think, finishing second.

The Philadelphia and the Giants were.

Were sort of neck and neck with the Browns after they surpassed them.

But those were the.

Really the.

The main two.

One of the.

I don't know if it's a blessing, but one of the reasons why the Browns were able to string together that eight game winning streak.

They won the games they needed to win.

Obviously like there were key games against the Eagles and Giants Stretch that they needed to win and they won.

So they won the big games, but they also, the rest of the division really, there was a drop off after that, let's be honest.

And they took care of business, I mean in a big way.

Like you look at some of the games like they just mowed through everybody else.

Including the biggest, the largest win in franchise history.

They beat The Washington Redskins 62 to 3 in that stretch, which still to this day is the, is the largest margin of victory in Brown's history.

So you know, they took care of business.

The rest of the division was not up to par and they did not screw around.

They, they were like, we need to win these games and they did.

So it wasn't a tight race.

There were, as I said, there were some key games that they won on the road, they won in bad weather conditions and they won with defense and they stepped up and won those big games, which is what championship teams do.

Yeah.

And over in the West, Detroit's fighting off a hard charge from the Chicago Bears all year.

San Francisco 49ers are right in there till the end and The Rams are about 500.

They sort of lost a little bit about their luster from they had in previous years.

So some competitive conferences going until like you said the final week they both had it locked up and they were playing each other.

So probably like we do now, probably rested the players and let the guys on the bench play the game out and it doesn't really matter at that.

Point in a snowstorm as well.

That was another factor there.

It was.

Oh really?

Oh, right before Christmas.

So it was right away it was like this is, this is going to be.

There's, there's very, there's very little we can take from this game and, and assess because it was not with the elements for, against them.

But as you said, like they're resting players, they're not going to show their hand.

They know they're going to play again the following week for all the marbles.

So that was really an exercise in futility that week.

I'm sure the ball boys were busy that day because with that ball change thing, that snowy day, I'm sure the quarterbacks were calling for the ball almost every play.

So.

Yeah, very interesting.

So take us into the championship game.

How does two teams are definitely the tops of their divisions or conferences?

They're meeting in the championship Third time in a row, star player, years all over, great coaching.

What happens in this game, and this.

Is one of the more interesting games, really, in Brown's history, because as we've alluded to, like, the ramp up for this was, oh, my gosh, the Lions have the Browns number.

So even though the game was in Cleveland, they would alternate every year through this era between the divisions who would host from one year to the next.

So it was in Cleveland.

So there was that.

Even knowing that hosting the championship game, the Browns were not the favorite, the Lions were still favored, largely because everybody in America knew that the Lions just had the Browns number.

They'd won the previous two championship games.

The Browns had yet to beat the Lions even in the regular season.

And they just.

They.

Not only did they beat them, and many of the games were close, but they just seem to have a way to bring out the worst in the Browns.

Otto Graham in these.

He had played four games against the Lions going into this game, had not thrown a touchdown pass in the previous year's championship games.

He completed two passes.

Like, this is what we're talking about.

Otto Graham was the best quarterback in the game at the time, and they.

He was completely shut down.

He was completely.

He could not do anything.

So there.

This sense that just like, boy, the.

The lines just have the Browns number.

There's nothing the Browns can do.

So there was.

I don't even know if it's.

Cautious optimism.

No one.

No one expected the Browns to come out and win this game by 46 points as it turned out to be.

This is one of the most stunning turns of events, one of the more surprising moments in Brown's history.

Nobody expected that to happen.

Yeah.

So.

So how did this happen?

What.

What did they change?

Did they have, like, a.

A philosophical change of how they played Detroit or.

Surprised a little bit.

You know, to be honest, I always have looked at this, and as I've researched it, there was a little bit of that.

I mean, to be sure, there were adjustments made before every time they played the Lions.

Paul Brown, one of the masterminds of coaching then and for years to come, certainly would always make adjustments and would study and try to find out why were we not able to be successful the way we were against all other teams and all their weeks.

So there was that going on.

And to be sure, there were adjustments made just as there had been in previous encounters with Lions.

I've always had the point of view that was like, this was an example that we see in sports of sort of the fate Stepping in to balance the scale.

This was just like, these are two teams that are really, really evenly matched over time, over five, the five or six years that they were really at the top of the league.

And.

And there was.

Even though Detroit had the better of this series and won most of the games, they weren't that much better than the Browns, indicated by.

They generally weren't blowing the Browns out.

They just always seemed to get the breaks they always seem to get.

And.

And they deserve them.

Like, they.

To be sure they played well enough to win all of those games, but everything just kind of went their way.

Like flipping a coin.

Like, you get heads six times in a row.

This was the day where it's like, okay, the scales of sports said, no, no, no, that's enough.

Like, everything else is going to go.

Everything for the last five years has gone your way.

Today.

It's going to go their way.

And it very much was like that.

And it did.

Like, it just snowballed.

The Browns scored 56 points.

They hadn't scored 56 points in the four games against the Lions combined.

A lot of turnovers, a lot of mistakes.

Otto Graham played one of the greatest games of his career.

He threw for three touchdowns after not throwing for any in the previous four games against Detroit.

And ra, he was responsible for six touchdowns.

And that's a guy that's fate turning and just like, winking at you like, yeah, what happened before those previous five that wasn't you.

That wasn't quite fair or balanced.

We're going to balance it out today.

So you can argue whether or not it's like, well, is it better to lose two championship games and any number or three, actually, if you throw in the later one in 57 to get it all back in one day?

I don't know, but that's.

To me, that's what happened happened.

Like, there's no other real way to explain it other than.

Yeah, it was just one of those days where the scales just tipped the other way and it all balanced out.

Three years of bad luck just balanced out in one day.

Yeah.

And that had to be, I mean, a mild surprise to experts that had been following the National Football League, like you said, for reasons of Detroit being slightly favored in there.

You know, something else I found kind of interesting, you know, going through his championship games and just looking at.

At, you know, who were the.

The award player awards going to, they didn't have but maybe a handful of them going out in the NFL at that time.

But there's only one player between The Browns and the Lions that has any recognition, really, the end of the year.

And that's Groza, who the Sporting News gave the NFL Player of the Year.

Everything else is out on the West Coast.

It's the, the 49ers and the Rams collecting.

You know, Van Brocklin's the, the passing leader, Joe Perry's the rushing leader.

Receiving leaders.

Bob Boyd of the Rams and UPI gave Joe Perry the NFL Most valuable Player.

So kind of, kind of interesting.

Usually the championship teams and teams that are at the top usually have the stars and get most of the accolades.

So that's kind of a unique situation.

Yeah.

And definitely says something, as I mentioned before, about sort of the gritty nature of these teams.

These were not, even though they had star players, they were not about statistics.

They weren't going to light up a scoreboard.

Very similar to some of the great teams we saw later, like the Pittsburgh Steelers of the 70s, so on, so forth.

Like, they're very gritty.

They get the job done.

It may not be pretty, but they're going to win.

And that's.

And that is a lot like even Otto Graham, you look at him in the year he had, he had an amazing game in the championship, everyone still knew he was probably the best overall quarterback in the game.

He had 11 touchdown passes and 17 interceptions, 17 interceptions in 12 games.

Games.

That's a lot like, that's not.

By any modern standard, that's a terrible season.

But he was still.

He was middle of the pack statistically.

So again, sort of balance, you know, adjusting for inflation, what statistics mean.

But that's the kind of thing you would see with these kind of like, grit and even now, like, that's not.

It was as true as it was for the era.

We see that now in, in football and in all sports.

The 54 team was probably the worst of that run.

Like, they were almost certainly worse than the three previous teams, Browns teams that had lost the championship.

And we see this in sports, right.

Like a lot of times, no matter what the sport, like when you have a good, a really strong franchise that goes on a run where they're in a.

They're a title contender for a series of years.

It's funny how often the best overall seasons or the best individual teams in that run don't win championships and the lesser air quote, lesser teams that win less games or have the injuries or don't have the pretty season that they set the records and have all kinds of great statistics, they do end up winning.

And that's just indicative of like the core of the, of the team.

And it's as much as it's great to, you know, go 14 and two and have a quarterback who throws 40 touchdown passes, that's wonderful and that looks great, but it doesn't always translate into postseason success and, or into a championship.

It's the, it's the things we don't always see.

It's the offensive line, it's the defensive line, it's the gritty things, it's the endurance of the special teams, it's the ability to persevere through the playoffs.

And a lot of times that'll happen because the team is experienced, because the team believes in itself.

Even if it hasn't had a glitty, a glittery type of season like that's.

These are very lunch bucket, as I mentioned, lunch bucket types of teams.

They're going to show up every year and you do not want to face them in the postseason because no matter what their record was, no matter how many games they lost, you don't want to deal with them once you hit the, the postseason trying to play for a championship.

Yeah, that's an interesting point.

You bring up how these teams just when they're the down years are when they seem to have their best.

I guess a modern equivalent would probably be the undefeated Patriots losing to the gritty Giants or maybe when Tampa Bay beat Mahomes and the Chief.

That Chiefs team, which was probably maybe their strongest when they still had Tyree Kill and Hunts running like crazy, might be better than some of the more recent Chiefs teams.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, yeah, very interesting point.

Well, well, you, we mentioned earlier that you have some great books on Brown's history.

Why don't you tell us a little bit about the books and where folks can get them at?

Yeah, I mean, so, I mean everything's available on Amazon.

You can still be able to look me up or look up some of the, some of the titles and, and be able to get them all pretty easily.

So it runs the gamut.

I mean, my very first book was about the cardiac kids.

In Brown's history.

That was my first one.

That was gosh that was almost, that was over 20 years ago now.

And then the rest of them just sort of, it runs the gamut.

As I said.

That whole, that whole era which I grew up with, with which was great to write about.

So those, those all kind of captured those two at least.

And the Classic Browns came out in two editions.

A few years later I did a second edition and added some games and moved some things around.

So that was a lot of fun to do and sparked a lot of debate and discussion, which was the point amongst Brown's fans, which was wonderful.

And then as we talked about earlier, Paul's Brown, Paul Brown's ghost, which was not only about Paul Brown and the history of the Browns, but has it as it connects to the Cincinnati Bengals as, as they really are because of Paul Brown.

1.

Yeah, very interesting.

And folks, football historians, if you want to, you know, catch some Brown's history, there's some great resources right there to check out.

And like I said, we'll have the links in the show notes of both the YouTube and the audio podcast and on Pigs Can Dispatch.

We'll get you hooked up with Jonathan that way or go on Amazon and look up his author's page.

Jonathan Knight with a K.

Jonathan, we really appreciate you coming on here and sharing this great history once again with us.

And, and I promise you I won't make it so long again before your guest on here because you're very interesting guests and have a lot of knowledge to share and preserve football history.

And we thank you.

Oh, thank you, Darren.

It's my pleasure.

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