The Cleveland Browns almost had Len Dawson over Jim Brown

Pretty much every football fan knows Jim Brown. And pretty much every Kansas City Chiefs fan knows Len Dawson. Both are Pro Football Hall of Famers, but the two legends are surprisingly more connected than might first meet the eye.

Even though Len Dawson became a legend with the Kansas City Chiefs and legendary coach Hank Stram, his career actually didn’t begin with the team. It began with the Pittsburgh Steelers, the team that drafted him in the 1957 NFL draft.

But even that was merely by chance. According to Yahoo! Sports, Dawson would have been a Cleveland Brown thanks to Paul Brown’s infatuation with the Purdue quarterback. As luck would have it, both the Browns and the Steelers had the same record that year and had to flip a coin on who would draft first. The Steelers won, and in a classic rivalry move, they chose Dawson fifth overall, one pick ahead of the Browns.

So who did Paul Brown and his team take at sixth overall? Jim Brown.

More Articles About Len Dawson:

You’d think this was a win-win for both teams. They both drafted future Hall of Famers. But it didn’t. The Browns immediately became the winner of the lost coin toss and Dawson languished on Pittsburgh’s roster for two years before ultimately being traded to… Cleveland.

Things didn’t work out there either for Dawson, who was released just two seasons later. Not many quarterbacks can say their careers took off after their fourth season. But for Dawson it did. He signed with the young Dallas Texans and reunited with Stram (who had coached him at Purdue). The rest, you could say, is history.

Both Dawson and Brown would go on to have incredible careers, albeit Brown’s was considerably shorter than Dawson’s. Both players would win a championship, with Brown winning one of the final NFL championships, and Dawson winning one of the first Super Bowls.

The only real loser in the career of both these men is, ironically, the Pittsburgh Steelers. They no doubt thought that winning the coin toss in 1957 would lead to a better outcome than it did. Their win (loss) was Kansas City’s (and Cleveland’s) gain.