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Monday Night Football opens its’ regular season tonight with the annual opening week doubleheader, a tradition started a couple years ago  that has become quite popular. MNF has become a tradition in itself after humble beginnings in 1970. NFL football in 1970 was completely different than the game today, but there was so much “newness” going on at that time that the game was really starting to become the nation’s real national pastime. At the point where the NFL decided to try the Monday night experiment, the league had just merged with the American Football League and realigned itself into the National and American Conferences. Three NFL teams – Cleveland, Pittsburgh and the Baltimore Colts – were transferred into the AFC to balance out the 2 conferences. So even though the first MNF matchup between the Browns and New York Jets was technically a game between 2 AFC teams, it was far from that. The NFL had long claimed superiority over the NFL until the Jets and Kansas City Chiefs pulled off huge Super Bowl upsets and cemented the AFL’s place as an equally-talented league. The Browns-Jets matchup opened the MNF season in 1970 after the Chiefs had beaten the Vikings in SB IV, and Namath’s Jets were already over a year removed from their upset win over the Colts in SB III that changed pro football forever. The Browns were a proud NFL team that was getting its’ shot at quieting the brash, young upstart quarterback from the AFL, Joe Namath. The broadcast team for the game was not the famous trio that put MNF on the map – Frank Gifford, Don Meredith and Howard Cosell. Keith Jackson was the play-by-play man in the first season, but the following year moved to doing college telecasts for ABC and was replaced by Gifford. Cosell, of course, became the star of the MNF show over time and was hated by fans everywhere for his pompous attitude, but that was all part of the show. In fact, ABC’s Roone Arledge completely changed the way games were covered, introducing more sideline closeups of players and coaches and microphones to catch what was being said on the sidelines. There was more drama and showmanship brought into the broadcasts, and interviews of famous people by Cosell in the booth became commonplace. Ronald Reagan and John Lennon were just 2 of the people Cosell interviewed during the games. You were nobody if you hadn’t been interviewed by Cosell on MNF back then. Also, Cosell’s halftime highlight show became hugely popular.

Howard Cosell

As for the first game itself, the Browns, with veteran Bill Nelsen at quarterback, future Hall of Famer Leroy Kelly having long since replaced Jim Brown as the featured back, and veteran split end Gary Collins running circles around a young, inexperienced Jet secondary, jumped out to a 14-0 lead. The Jets cut it to 14-7 at halftime, then Homer Jones made the biggest play of his career by returning the second half kickoff 94 yards for a touchdown to widen the Browns’ lead to 21-7. Namath rallied the Jets back to within 24-21, but late in the game threw an interception that LB Billy Andrews returned for a touchdown that climaxed a 31-21 Cleveland victory. The Browns gave the NFL old guard a small measure of revenge for the 2 previous Super Bowls with the win, but the sport was on its’ way to evolving into the entertainment giant it is today. Pete Rozelle’s vision of growing the game, with the merger, Monday Night Football and the Super Bowl, has grown beyond even his wildest dreams.

Since I wasn’t even alive yet when the 1946 football season began, the title of this post is a bit misleading. I don’t actually “remember” the 1946 season, but it’s worth a look back since this was an historic year for the pro game. For starters, the NFL made a change in the commisioner’s office, replacing Elmer Layden with Bert Bell. Bell presided over the league until his death in 1959, when Pete Rozelle took over. Bell’s tenure included the wild and wooly 1950s, when NFL games started to be televised and the league began to grow into the “monster” it is today.

A major rule change was made in 1946 also, as the “free substitution” rule  was withdrawn and changed to only allow 3 subs at a time. Another change made any forward pass which struck the goalposts automatically incomplete. The game changed for the city of Cleveland in a major way in 1946 also. At that time, the Rams were located in Cleveland, but the league allowed Rams’ owner Dan Reeves to move the franchise to Los Angeles. However, the All American Football Conference also began play in 1946, and Cleveland’s entry in this new league, the Browns, dominated play for the entire history of the AAFC and eventually became a dominant force in the NFL when the leagues merged.

The move of the Rams to L.A. was historic for 2 different reasons. First, it expanded the NFL to the west coast for the first time, opening up a whole new audience for the game. But that wasn’t the most important reason. For the 1946 season, the Rams signed the first 2 African American players to play in the modern NFL era, home-town UCLA stars Kenny Washington and Woody Strode. Other black players, most notably Fritz Pollard, had played in the NFL in its’ early years when the game was considered a “savage” sport, but league owners outlawed them from the league. So it was historic when Washington and Strode joined the Rams, a full year prior to Jackie Robinson, a gridiron teammate of Strode and Washington at UCLA, breaking the color line in baseball. Incidentally, that same season, Marion Motley and Bill Willis, also African Americans, played in the AAFC for coach Paul Brown’s Browns.

UCLA teammates, from left: Woody Strode, Jackie Robinson and Kenny Washington.

The Chicago Bears won the NFL title game in 1946, 24-14 over the New York Giants, but not without some controversy. Two Giants’ backs were questioned about an attempt by a New York man to fix the title game, and one was suspended.

The 2010 NFL season begins tonight, with the Super Bowl champion New Orleans Saints meeting the Minnesota Vikings in a rematch of the NFC title game last season. Who would have guessed that a city where the fans used to wear bags over their heads and call their team the “Ain’ts” would win a Super Bowl? Will any history be made this season?