David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, Paul Brown was quite the anticipated figure in Cleveland. He had coached at Ohio State, he had coached one of the Navy teams and he was sort of known for knowing how to whip a football team into shape, who would have to know the intellectual side of the game as inside and out as the physical part of the game. It was a huge part of his strategy to make people memorize the playbook and take written tests. And if they failed these written tests about the plays, about the rules, about Paul's strategy, he'd kick him off the team, no matter how good they were. And it's the first time someone really looked at the game and said, sure, it's a game, but actually this could be a science. He was almost like the first money baller. One of the first innovations he did was he was one of the first coaches to really review film and recognize patterns in plays and statistically manually tally, here's what we have to do against this team and that team, and here's what worked for us last year, and here's what didn't work for us this year. Paul Brown was the first modern, not just football coach, but I think sports coach period in America. And you know, every human is flawed, we shouldn't make him out to be the Messiah or something, but he was basically the first coach to start racial integration of the team and recognize that if we have the best players, then we're going to win. We just need to do whatever it takes to get the best players on our team. The other thing that he did, he employed an entire staff of assistant coaches year round. I think it was six people in addition to him. No other team did that.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.