NFL History | Cleveland Municipal Stadium — The League That Was Left Out of the Record Book

The two men who broke professional football's color line for good did it in the other league, and the record book took seventy-nine years to notice they had been playing.

Paul Brown put Bill Willis and Marion Motley on the field here on 6 September 1946, in the first game the All-America Football Conference ever played. Cleveland beat the Miami Seahawks 44–0. This was five months after the Rams signed Kenny Washington under pressure from the Los Angeles Coliseum Commission, and unlike that signing it was nobody's condition of lease. Brown had coached both men before, Willis at Ohio State and Motley on a Navy service team, and he wanted them.

Notice the arrangement anyway. The club's own account is that Motley was signed to be Willis's roommate, which is the same solution the Rams reached with Woody Strode, because a Black player travelling alone had nowhere to sleep. Two clubs in two leagues arrived at the same piece of segregated arithmetic in the same year.

One date needs care. Wikipedia's AAFC season page gives 9 September 1946 for their first appearance; the club and its own season record give 6 September. Check before printing it.

The Browns won all four AAFC championships, went 15–0 in 1948, and then played in the NFL championship game in each of their first six NFL seasons, winning three. For seventy-five years almost none of that was in the league's official statistics. AFL numbers from 1960 to 1969 were folded into the record after the 1970 merger. AAFC numbers were not, the reason usually given being that the scoresheets could not be found.

In spring 2025 the owners approved incorporating AAFC player, coach and team statistics into the official record, after the Elias Sports Bureau and the Hall of Fame worked from the conference's own 1949 statistical supplement and from recovered scoresheets. Paul Brown's career coaching wins rose to 222. The 1948 Browns became a recognised perfect season alongside the 1972 Dolphins. Motley became the career leader in rushing average among high-volume backs, at 5.7 yards a carry. AAFC championships are listed separately rather than merged into the NFL's championship lineage.

Anything printed before spring 2025 is working from a different record book. A career total or a leaderboard found in an older source is not necessarily an error; it is answering a question the league has since rephrased.

Cleveland Municipal Stadium opened in 1931 on made ground at the lake edge, held the Browns until 1995 and came down in 1996. Its replacement stands on the same site.

Coordinate: the stadium site on the Cleveland lakefront. The Wikidata point and the successor stadium's OpenStreetMap node agree to within about 30 m. Precision ±60 m.

Cover: the Ring of Honor carrying both names, at the stadium that replaced Municipal. Photo: Erik Drost, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. This is the successor building on the same ground, not the 1946 stadium.

Second image: Cleveland Municipal Stadium on a Curt Teich postcard, 1955, laid out for baseball. Unknown photographer; public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.