The Cleveland Browns added a few more rings to their legacy.
On Tuesday, NFL owners voted to approve a proposal that would make statistics from the All-America Football Conference an official part of NFL history. The AAFC lasted from 1946 to 1949 when some of the teams were folded into the NFL.
That’s great news for the Browns, as they won all four AAFC championships before joining the NFL in 1950 and winning a title that year.
Paul Brown, longtime Browns head coach, will have 47 regular season wins added to his coaching record, along with nine more postseason wins. He’ll move into seventh place on the NFL’s all-time coaching wins list with 222.
Pro Football Talk has more information on the added statistics:
Browns fullback Marion Motley will now be considered the NFL’s all-time leader in yards per carry for a running back. Motley’s combined AAFC and NFL total was 828 carries for 4,720 yards, an average of 5.7 yards per carry.
Several other Hall of Famers will now have AAFC stats added to their legacies, including Browns quarterback Otto Graham, 49ers running back Joe Perry, and the great runner/receiver Elroy “Crazylegs” Hirsch, who played three years for the Chicago Rockets of the AAFC before joining the Los Angeles Rams in the NFL.
The Browns can now boast eight league championships. The four from the AAFC days, plus four NFL championships from before the AFL-NFL merger. Not sure that’ll help Cleveland’s fans deal with the current state of the franchise, but it can’t hurt.
