Your renamed-for-the-offseason Super Bowl 'prediction thread

Graham and Paul Brown, the only coach of his 10-year career in the All-America Football Conference and National Football League, were to professional football what the Wright Brothers were to aviation. They brought a dazzling passing game showcased by swift receivers flanked far from the combat zone to a brutish game of attrition where the pass was a third-and-long resort for many teams. The Browns' spread defenses with a flanker and split end. The Browns' offense of 55 years ago - less the shotgun - looks much like the Rams' offense of today...

The Brooklyn Dodgers certainly felt the strain of this bold, new approach on the early December day in 1946 when my dad said, "Let's go see this grass basketball team and this new quarterback." Brown's Browns put a premium on his rookie QB, yet still got superb production from fullback Marion Motley, who was a 245-pound monster on the draw plays and screens that became a staple of the offense.

"Grass basketball?" I asked. "Yeah, that's all it is," Dad sniffed through a nose broken a half-dozen times by "forearm shivers" and other weapons of the no-facemask era. Graham, by the way, became the first professional player to wear one.

He could have played without a helmet that unseasonably mild Dec. 8. In their last regular-season game, the Browns dazed the 14,600 Ebbets Field witnesses with a 66-14 ax murder. A week later, Graham whipped them past quicksilver-fast Buddy Young and the New York Yankees for the AAFC title. "These guys are good," Dad sniffed, "but they don't like to get their uniforms dirty."...

Skepticism abounded when the Browns joined the NFL for the 1950 season after the AAFC folded. They opened against the defending champion Eagles, which would restore the natural order of things. Smashmouth would rule these elusive dervishes from a league in which those huge offensive numbers were the result of inferior defenses, right?

The Browns easily outslugged the Eagles and they didn't stop slugging until they beat the Rams in the title game.

The Browns won four straight AAFC titles with Graham at QB, losing just four games in that span. They lost three straight NFL title games after the 1950 triumph, then bounced back in `54 with a 56-10 annihilation of Bobby Layne's Detroit Lions. Graham ran for three TDs and passed for three more. He was ready to retire, but money impelled Otto to play two more seasons.

Money? The $25,000 contract Graham signed before the 1955 season made him the NFL's highest-paid player. In 2003, it can cost a player more than that just to make a post-touchdown phone call.

So what was this guy whose team reached the big dances of the day in two leagues 10 straight years, who passed for two scores and ran for two more in his final game, a 38-14 championship-game victory over the Rams? What made him so special that people who saw him play - count me among them - consider him the best quarterback ever?

For starters, he was a two-time All-America basketball guard at Northwestern. Otto had no thoughts about playing football until coaching legend Lynn "Pappy" Waldorf saw him tossing a football around one day - effortless 60-yard spirals. Long after his playing and coaching days, Graham was asked about the passing accuracy that became his trademark.

"I never realized until I started coaching what a God-given talent I had," he said. "I was surprised that everyone couldn't do what I did."

Like most future professional quarterbacks of the era, Graham was a single-wing tailback at Northwestern. He was a tough, durable runner, but his passing skills set him apart. When Paul Brown left Ohio State (Graham beat him twice) to assemble what would become pro football's first dynasty, Graham was the first player he signed. Brown wrote in his biography, "Otto Graham was the greatest player in the game's history."

And on that rock, the man who also owned the team that still bears his name, built his church.

Graham was the closest pro football has ever come to a Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods presence. He dominated on their level. And the coach he played for was the closest football has come to the kind of dominance John Wooden established with UCLA's basketball program.

Otto could have written his own coaching contract when he retired. Nobody better understood the "pro set" that had been copied by the entire NFL by then. Instead, he chose the low-profile, non-scholarship environment of the Coast Guard Academy, where he was twice coach/athletic director. In between, he was 17-22-3 coaching a bad Redskins team. Vince Lombardi replaced him...

And if you want one more example of his prowess as a truly great athlete, Otto Graham was a member of the 1945-46 National Basketball League champion Rochester Royals.