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This Day In Sports…February 17, 1936:
The birth date of a player some will still argue is the greatest running back in NFL history. Jim Brown played for the Cleveland Browns from 1957-65, retiring in his prime at the age of 29. He was the Browns’ first round pick (sixth overall) in the 1957 NFL Draft and held every major NFL rushing record at the time of his departure. The Pro Football Hall of Famer led the league in rushing in eight of his nine seasons and is still the only player in NFL history to average over 100 yards rushing per game over his entire career.
If we give former Boise State great Ashton Jeanty a mulligan on his rookie year for the various challenges he faced in the Las Vegas organization, we can start the clock now on Jeanty aspiring to be like Brown. Comparisons of Jeanty have been made to Walter Payton, Emmitt Smith and Barry Sanders (especially when Jeanty was chasing Sanders’ college football single-season rushing in 2024). But like Ashton, Brown had a rare combination of strength, speed and balance, with a wicked stiff arm. And Jeanty has to admire this: Brown was never documented as having been tackled for a loss in his career.
Before becoming an NFL legend, Brown had starred for three seasons at Syracuse, where he was a unanimous All-American as a senior. Durability was another signature trait, as Brown never missed a game in the NFL. The league played 12-game seasons during Brown’s first four years in Cleveland, yet he recorded 1,000-yard seasons in three of them—and missed by just 58 yards as a rookie in 1957. Brown final five regular seasons were 14 games long, and he went over 1,000 yards in all but one of those, missing by four yards in the lone outlier. Brown led the Browns to their last NFL championship in 1964.
Brown doubled as a civil rights activist and actor after his retirement. His on-screen career was highlighted by a starring role in “The Dirty Dozen” in 1967 among his 53 acting credits. On the civil rights front, Brown founded the Black Economic Union to help promote opportunities for minority-owned businesses. He later launched the Amer-I-Can Foundation in an effort to divert at-risk youth from violence by teaching them life skills. Through Amer-I-Can, Brown facilitated the “Watts Truce” between rival street gangs in Los Angeles. He passed away in 2023. The late Jim Brown would have turned 90 years old today.
(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)
