A Day for Optimists

The people who run pro football are eternal optimists. They insist that on any given Sunday, any given team can beat any other team. Nobody really believes it -- until it happens. Last week the Cleveland Browns shut out the mighty Baltimore Colts 27-0 to win the National Football League championship -- thereby confounding the Colts, the experts, and practically everybody else. If it had been a horse race, the stewards would be asking for a saliva test. Not that the Eastern Champion Browns were bad. They had Jimmy Brown, who is merely the best running back in the history of football. They had Quarterback Frank Ryan, who threw 25 touchdown passes this year. But they also had the N.F.L.'s leakiest defense, by the margin of 237 yds. and 20 first downs. The experts figured that was a dainty dish to set before the Western Champion Colts, with the strongest offense (428 points) and the stingiest defense (225 points) in pro football. What's more, the East had won only one N.F.L. title in the last seven years. At game time, the oddsmakers favored Baltimore by seven points.

Inching Along. But Cleveland Coach Blanton Collier is an optimist, too. All he had to do was stop Baltimore Quarterback Johnny Unitas, the N.F.L.'s Player of the Year, who completed 51.8% of his passes this season. He even thought he knew a way. Noting that most teams played their defensive backs deeper than normal against Baltimore, conceding short passes in hopes of defusing Unitas's bombs, Collier decided to take the opposite tack--position his halfbacks a step shorter than usual, crowd the Colts' receivers, make them commit themselves sooner. In the line, he made another minor adjustment, moving Tackle Jim Kanicki over "about one inch"--until he was directly opposite Baltimore's All-Pro Guard Jim Parker, key man in Unitas's defense against the blitz. The idea was to force Parker into a head-to-head duel with Kanicki, thereby clearing the way for other Cleveland blitzers to harass Unitas.

Even Collier was amazed by the magnitude of his genius. The shortened Cleveland secondary disrupted Baltimore's pass patterns. Play after play, Unitas wasted precious moments trying to locate his receivers--and then had to eat the ball. In the first half, the Colts never got past their opponents' 19. Of course, neither did the Browns.

But, early in the third quarter, 79,544 fans in Cleveland's Municipal Stadium saw Lou ("The Toe") Groza boot a 43-yd. field goal, and suddenly the floodgates opened. Swinging wide to the left, Fullback Brown took a pitchout, cut back, and churned 46 yds. to the Baltimore 18. (Murmured one spectator: "Put a cape on him, and he's Superman.") Quarterback Ryan was a little nervous about calling the next play--a tricky "hook-post" pass to Flanker Gary Collins behind the goal posts. On the same play five times this season he had bounced the ball off the crossbar. This time he hit Collins on the chest and heaved a sigh of relief. "Whew!" said Ryan later. "For a while I thought for sure that was No. 6."

Flipping a Fillip. Baltimore was double-teaming Cleveland's Split End Paul Warfield, so Collins had only one man to beat. Midway in the third quarter, he did a fancy little two-step, left Colt Defender Jerry Logan sprawled on the turf, gathered in a picture pass from Ryan for 42 yds. and another TD. Lou Groza boosted the score to 20-0 with his second field goal. In the fourth quarter, Collins added the final fillip--reaching back over his shoulder to pull in another wonderful 41-yd. pass at the 10, shrugging Defensive Halfback Bobby Boyd off his shoulders, staggering into the end zone to make it 27-0. Then, with 26 sec. still showing on the clock, both teams ran for their lives as the exultant Cleveland crowd surged onto the field.

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