Revolutionaries

The T explosion came one year later. While the Bears were using the formation to go 8-3 on the way to the NFL Championship Game, in which they would annihilate the Washington Redskins 73-0, Shaughnessy, who had moved on to coach Stanford, was dazzling the college world with the T. Stanford went 9-0, then beat Nebraska 21-13 in the Rose Bowl. The rush was on. "I went back to Columbia to help Lou Little put in the T," Luckman said. "I went to Holy Cross, to Army when Red Blaik called me, to Notre Dame to work with Johnny Lujack and George Ratterman."

The Bears won four NFL titles in the 1940s, and other teams gradually switched to the new formation. Luckman, who in 10 games in 1943 threw 28 touchdown passes en route to winning league MVP honors, was the first T master, a gifted passer, long and short, a skilled faker and ball handler. He was there when it all began.

Otto Graham played for 10 years with the Cleveland Browns beginning in 1946, and the Browns were in a league championship game every one of those seasons. If you're looking for a record that never will be matched, that's a good place to start.

He played for a club that outrecruited everyone else (the heart of the post-World War II Browns was a group of service vets who still had college eligibility left), outcoached everyone else and was years ahead of the rest of pro football in organization and innovation. He played for the only coach to have an NFL team named after him, Paul Brown. Brown's ego reached such a peak that he decided that he, not Graham, would call the plays. That became Brown's system.

The messenger-guard rotation was introduced in the early '50s. Brown's bold move changed the game, even though the innovation didn't immediately catch on. Many stories of that era mentioned how unhappy Graham was with the arrangement, but he says it wasn't true. "A lot of people in this world have great egos, but on the Browns there was room for only one ego, and it wasn't mine," says Graham, who's 76 and living in Sarasota, Fla. "I never openly criticized the coach. We had a checkoff system, and occasionally I'd change one of his plays, but as for his calling the game, we never talked about it. He was the admiral, the general, the CEO.

"I'm sure that some quarterbacks couldn't have played in that system," says Graham, who twice led the NFL in passing yardage and was the top-rated passer of his time. "I don't think Bobby Layne could have. But what I loved was that we were a passing team in an era of the run. In the morning we'd work on the run, in the afternoon the pass. What were my talents? I could throw hard if I had to, I could lay it up soft, I could drill the sideline pass. God-given ability. The rest was practice, practice, practice. I had the luxury of having the same receivers for almost my entire career. We developed the timed sideline attack, the comeback route where the receiver goes to the sideline, stops and comes back to the ball, with everything thrown on rhythm."

In their NFL debut in 1950, the Browns, four-time champs of the rival All-America Football Conference, crushed the defending NFL champion Philadelphia Eagles 35-10. Philly's 5-2 defense couldn't cover the sideline comebacks. The Giants scouted that game and, dropping the ends in their 6-1 alignment into linebacker positions, stopped the Browns when the teams met two weeks later. The 4-3, today's standard defensive set, was born.

"After the game against the Eagles," says Graham, "their coach, Greasy Neale, said we were nothing but a basketball team. Pretty good basketball team, huh?"

In 1955, after completing an unremarkable career at Louisville, getting drafted in the ninth round by the Pittsburgh Steelers and being released near the end of training camp, 22-year-old John Unitas was the quarterback for the Bloomfield Rams in western Pennsylvania. He made six bucks a game. "They called it semipro football," he says. "Actually it was just sandlot, a bunch of guys knocking the hell out of each other on an oil-soaked field under the Bloomfield Bridge."

Five years later, after Unitas had led the Baltimore Colts to two NFL championships, Eagles quarterback Norm Van Brocklin was asked what made Unitas so great. "He knows what it's like to eat potato soup seven days a week," the Dutchman replied.