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Bobby Mitchell is a Pro Football Hall of Famer whose story is one of enduring the sting of racism and changing the attitudes of an entire franchise with class and dignity. He was a football and track star at the University of Illinois and was undecided on whether to pursue a pro football career or a chance to compete for the U.S. in the Olympics, when, in 1958, Paul Brown drafted him to the Cleveland Browns and offered him $7,000 to join the team. Mitchell accepted, and went to Cleveland to pair up with the great Jim Brown in the Browns’ backfield. For 4 seasons, the 2 future Hall of Famers formed the NFL’s best rushing duo. Coach Brown and Jim Brown had somewhat of a mercurial relationship, with the coach wanting to run a tight ship and the big fullback not liking to be ordered around. The coach recognized that his star runner carried a bit of clout, and Mitchell has laughingly said that in his days in Cleveland, when Paul Brown needed to make a point with Jim Brown, he would yell at Mitchell to make the point rather than directly confront Brown. Mitchell’s life changed shortly after the 1962 NFL draft. The owner of the Washington Redskins, George Preston Marshall, was an avowed racist who refused to add any black players to his team. At the time, the Redskins’ fan base stretched far into the deep south as their games were regionally televised in many southern states, so besides being a racist himself, Marshall also did not want to upset the team’s “southern audience” by  having black players on his club. The justice department applied extreme pressure on him to integrate the Redskins, even threatening to revoke the team’s right to play in federally owned D.C. Stadium.

Marshall finally caved in to the pressure and reluctantly traded the rights to the top pick of the draft, running back Ernie Davis of Syracuse, to the Browns for Mitchell and the Browns’ top pick. Davis was found to be suffering from leukemia and died before ever playing a down in the NFL, while Mitchell and another African American player, guard John Nisby, joined the Redskins as their first black members. The Washington franchise would now become the last NFL team to integrate their roster, much to Marshall’s chagrin. Mitchell recalled an incident in training camp when the usual rookie hazing was going on. Veteran players would hoot and holler as they forced the newcomers to sing their college fight songs and such. Mitchell, who wasn’t a rookie by the way, was forced to stand up and sing. He remembers a finger jabbing him in his back and saying “sing, Bobby Mitchell, sing!” The finger belonged to the owner, Marshall, and the song was “Dixie”. Marshall actually used to have the Redskins’ band play that song instead of the national anthem at Redskin games at the time also. That was just one example of what Mitchell had to endure during his first season in Washington.

1961 Washington Redskins, the NFL’s last all-white team

Having to put up with all the racist indignities didn’t affect Mitchell’s play on the field. The team’s new coach, Bill McPeak, moved him from halfback to flanker and he responded by leading the league in receptions. He slowly earned his teammates’ respect and at season’s end, he was given a game ball, signed by all his Redskin teammates, congratulating him for his statistical success. The ball is now on display at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, and is pictured below. It was more than just a congratulatory symbol from those teammates. It was a sign of acceptance from his fellow players, most of whom didn’t share the views of the owner. Mitchell quietly silenced the racism with another 6 years of excellence on the field, culminating in his being enshrined in the Hall of Fame in 1983. He spent 34 years in the Redskins’ front office after retiring as a player, but in what amounts to a separate story, was passed over a couple of times for the team’s general manager position.

Bobby Mitchell ball display at the Hall of Fame in Canton

With the Philadelphia Eagles taking on the Detroit Lions on this week’s NFL schedule, Throwback Thursday will travel back to a wild card playoff game between these 2 teams played on December 30, 1995 at Philly’s Veteran’s Stadium. The game was a shootout for the ages, but not in the usual way. There wasn’t the usual back-and-forth excitement that comes along with high scoring affairs, and with the hometown Eagles winning by a 3 touchdown margin 58-37, you could classify this game as a blowout shootout. The 1995 season marked the end of quarterback Randall Cunningham’s tenure with the Eagles, and for this game he was relegated to the bench as Rodney Peete, a former Lion, took the reins. Detroit’s starting QB, Scott Mitchell, was benched during the game after an ineffective start, and was replaced by Don Majkowski, a veteran who had earned the nickname “The Majik Man” for his exploits early in his career with the Green Bay Packers. The Eagles had extra motivation going into the game as Detroit offensive tackle Lomas Brown had guaranteed that his club would win. And for the first two and a half quarters, Philly took no prisoners. Peete fired 3 touchdown passes, Rickey Watters scored a pair of touchdowns, Fred Barnett hauled in 8 passes for 109 yards and a TD and the Eagle defense intercepted Mitchell 4 times to open up a resounding 51-7 lead. The Lions stubbornly single-covered Barnett and Peete repeatedly made them pay.

QB Rodney Peete barks out signals

At that point the Lions turned to the Majik Man, and he definitely gave them a spark. He led four touchdown drives, finishing 3 of them with TD passes. He re-discovered a sleeping weapon, wide receiver Herman Moore, with one of those scoring throws covering 68 yards to the big Lion wideout. Moore wound up with 7 catches for 133 yards in the game. Majkowski pulled his team to within 51-21. Unfortunately, Detroit could never get their most potent weapon, running back Barry Sanders, going at all in this game. The huge deficit and a swarming Eagle defense pretty much negated any rushing attack. The score also forced Majkowski into exclusively passing, and eventually the one-dimensional attack caught up with him. He added 2 more interceptions late in the game, including a 30 yard pick six by Eagle safety  William Thomas that sealed the win. The Lions didn’t pack it in, however. Majkowski engineered 2 more scoring drives after which the Lions had successful two point conversions to bring the final score to 58-37. It stood as the highest scoring playoff game in NFL history until 2009, when Arizona defeated Green Bay 51-45 in overtime.

Just as important as players, coaches, contributors and others are to the 100 years of NFL football, strategies developed over the years are key to the development of the modern game. The T-formation, forward pass, the 4-3 defensive alignment and the shotgun formation have all been a part of the game’s evolving history. Another tactic that came to be in the 1960s and is still used to this day is the safety blitz. “Blitzing” had been a term used to identify when a defense rushed more than the usual four defensive line players on a passing play. Mainly, the extra player sent was a linebacker and the tactic was called a “red dog”. That tactic was used in the late 1950s in the NFL. In 1960, a little known defensive assistant with the St. Louis Cardinals, Chuck Drulis,  devised the safety blitz, with one of the safeties being sent on the rush instead of, or along with, a linebacker. The design didn’t work very well at first, since the Cardinals didn’t have a defensive back athletic enough to make it successful. But in 1961 the Cardinals drafted a cornerback from Utah named Larry Wilson, who was a great athlete. Drulis convinced the head coach, Pop Ivy, to convert Wilson to safety and the safety blitz was born to become a standard part of NFL defenses. The Cardinals called their version of the new blitz the “Wildcat”, and that became Wilson’s nickname. (The “Wildcat” is nowadays widely known as an offensive formation.) Wilson went on to use the safety blitz, among his other skills, to turn his NFL career into a Hall of Fame one. He is regarded in many circles as the greatest Cardinal player of all time, or at least the greatest of their St. Louis era.

Hall of Fame safety Larry “Wildcat” Wilson

Meanwhile, over in the fledgling American Football League, the offenses were entertaining fans with a wide open style of play, as Houston’s George Blanda, San Diego’s John Hadl and the Chiefs’ Len Dawson were filling the air with bombs and piling up the points. In Buffalo, the head coach was a former defensive player, Lou Saban, and the Bills went against the grain, building a top-notch defense. Saban’s top defensive assistant was a mild mannered, bespectacled and cerebral man named Joel Collier. He incorporated the Cardinals’ safety blitzing into the Bills’ defense and his safety, George Saimes, became known as the AFL’s master of the tactic. It didn’t hurt that he was one of the league’s ablest open field tacklers. Collier, by the way, went on to become a major innovator in the NFL. In later years in Denver he is widely accepted as the inventor of the 3-4 defensive alignment. In today’s game, the safety blitz is just another part of every team’s defensive strategy. Teams nowadays send players from everywhere. Linebackers still are the main blitzers, but the safety blitz and cornerback blitz are a standard part of the game, as dropping huge defensive linemen into pass coverage has also become commonplace. The athleticism of today’s players has evolved to the point where defensive coordinators can devise strategies that make quarterbacks and offensive coaches shudder.

George Saimes(26) blitzes Joe Namath