You have seen me often say that my Browns should run the ball more. I was thinking about this tonight and brought up a Browns highlight DVD type of what the Browns did way back when. Throughout the history of pro football Cleveland has had more outstanding runners than any other team. A lot may be too young to remember some of the names I will bring up but they are some of the best runners in the history of football. Some name spellings may be wrong but I'm pretty much going from memory....
Of course the running attack has to be led with the name Jim Brown but he may not have been the Browns' best runner but we will save that for a bit later...
After Jim Brown we had Leroy Kelly. He was not a Jim Brown but still special. In his first season he ran for over 1000 yards when that actually meant a lot.
Skip ahead and we have Mike and Greg Pruitt. And let us not leave out Eric Metcalf. Oh, the Browns also had one of the best running tandems with Kevin Mack and Earnest Byner both having over 1000 yards rushing in the same season.
If you were to make a list of the top 50 runners the Browns would easily cover at least 8 if not 10.
OK, I said the Browns may have had a better runner than Jim Brown. As impossible as that may seem there was a man named Marion Motley that was the runner before Brown. Motley was not fair. He was larger than two defensive players combined and fast. He was like a man playing with kids. I don't expect the name Motley to be remembered unless one was to be an old time Browns fan but he was a force of nature. He still holds the record for average yards per carry at 5.7 throughout his entire career. Jim Brown averaged 5.2 yards per carry.
Oh, as to records... Jim Brown still has one that is never mentioned. He is still the only runner ever in the NFL to average over 100 yards per game. Not that he had over 100 yards every game but he averaged over 100.
Sigh, so today they keep the history of having a superior running attack so why won't they run the danged ball
??
