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A Little Talk To Start A Big Season: Paul Brown, Mike Brown, Joe Burrow, And Bengals Living Their History

Somehow, Joe Burrow, born nearly 90 years after Paul Brown, has been in the present with the Bengals founder. Both, after all, are quarterbacks reared in the nooks and crannies of Ohio who transferred from Ohio State to make history elsewhere.

"I always enjoy learning the history of the game and Paul Brown played such a big part in that," Burrow says.

So when Paul Brown's son and Burrow's boss welcomed the Bengals back this week with his annual address in the team meeting room at Paycor Stadium, the best quarterback in the NFL listened as if he were getting the next play from the cackle of the radio helmet Paul Brown invented.

Bengals president Mike Brown, who turns 90 next month in between his team's first two preseason games, always talks to them in the first meeting of training camp.

Like Paul Brown did.

It's the only time Mike Brown talks to them as a team. Sometimes it's about logistics and sometimes it's about expectations and sometimes it's about how their division came to be on the water's edge of Ohio.

But this year was different. It was an homage to his father. Mike Brown feared his talk might be too long and that the young guys would lose interest in the maze of cobwebs. But it turned out to be a 20-minute gift.

"Those are stories I knew and facts that I knew," Burrow says. "But to hear a first-person account of that was, I think, very valuable for everyone there."

Mike Brown was born in the middle of the 1930s in the middle of the Depression and in the middle of Paul Brown's immortal-like run at Massillon High School.

So Mike was a football-crazed kid when Paul Brown coached Ohio State to its first national title. He was like one of those little guys that came out Wednesday for autographs when Paul coached future stars as World War II ground to a halt before helping get a new league off the ground with a team in Cleveland they named after him. The little man watched a big thing when his dad started by integrating pro football with two Ohio guys.

Then Mike Brown was in high school, a quarterback, of course, when his father made the Browns America's first team while inventing the radio helmet, face mask and draw play along the way.

"Things that you guys use and see today," is how Mike Brown knocked off the cobwebs.

When Mike Brown came down to talk, there was a biography on his desk. There's always a biography on his desk. It could be about Ben Franklin or Franklin Pierce or Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But there's always one, and there are times he'll wonder in awe how the historians can do it with no one left to tell it for the first-hand footnotes. Sometimes, he'll just wonder.

So, on the eve of the Bengals' 58th season, Burrow's sixth year at the helm, and his 90th year, Mike Brown went first-hand.

"Mr. Brown doesn't talk a lot," Burrow says. "But when he does, it's a gold nugget or a valuable piece of information."

Paul Brown's fellow high school coaches banded together to urge Ohio State to hire him. When the first radio helmet failed, his quarterback, George Ratterman, kidded the press when he said it picked up police calls. But they went with the headlines anyway.

Bill Willis and Marion Motley? His dad knew they were really good. Future Hall-of-Famers, it turned out. Willis played for him. Motley played against him. He thought they could help his new venture. He didn't think of them as black. Mike Brown spent his first pro training camps sneaking into the dorms at night to play "Hearts," with his heroes. Willis. Motley. The punter Horace Gillom. The game's first black players. All Mike knew is they were nice enough to let him hang with Gods.

When Motley and Otto Graham fouled up a handoff and Motley still broke a big run, they watched the tape the next day and didn't see a broken play, "but the germ of a new one." The Draw.

When Graham was cheap-shotted in the face and needed 17 stitches, Paul searched for something big enough to protect Graham but small enough for him to see. A plastic bar in front of the face was soon in every locker.

"I've certainly familiarized myself with it all through reading and watching," says Bengals head coach Zac Taylor. "But it's cool to hear Mike talk about it because he's lived the history. There's usually a little more detail."

Taylor has often sat across the desk with the biographies talking about the first Bengals head coach. He'll ask questions about those things he's read and heard to hear Mike Brown's perspective.

"He was a little more detailed than he has been," Taylor says of The Talk.

But he heard a new one this week. Brown mentioned in his talk that Branch Rickey, the man who integrated major league baseball with the Dodgers and Jackie Robinson the year after Brown integrated pro football, reached out to Paul Brown about a decade later when he was running the Pirates.

By this time, the mid-1950s or so, Brown was one of the headline names in sports, and Rickey wanted to know if he'd come manage Pittsburgh. But he was a football coach, Paul Brown told him. Yes, Rickey said. He had plenty of guys around who knew baseball. What he needed was a leader.

"That was new to me, but it makes sense," Taylor says. "They were looking for leadership and turned to one of the guys that was excelling in leadership. That makes sense."

Andrei Iosivas, the third-year receiver born in the last year of Paul Brown's century, loved it even though he remembers watching the video of Paul Brown's career as a rookie. Eric Ball, the director of player relations, makes sure every rookie class watches NFL Films' classic A Football Life: Paul Brown.

"I think legacy means something. I think history means something. I think tradition means something," Iosivas says. "I loved it as a family guy myself. You're proud of your family, your heritage. That's what this organization is built on. It was good to hear it from him. And he's proud of his dad. He loves football. You love to play for a guy who loves ball."

It turns out Mike Brown's talk helped get the stomach churning for football. Orlando Brown Jr., the decorated left tackle stalking a second Super Bowl title, prepped for this camp watching old-timey NFL Films features. Mike Brown's talk was like getting one live with Steve Sabol and the drums and the trumpets marching into the meeting room.

But then, Orlando Brown Jr., whose father played with Paul Brown's descendants in Cleveland, always got the history. Note at Wednesday's first practice, Orlando walked over to Mike's golf cart for a chat.

Still, there was something special about that talk the other day. Orlando Brown lost his father at age 15. The great Zeus Brown, a ferocious self-made player whose resilience and strength became the face of the Browns when they moved to Baltimore, was barely 40 when he passed.

"Think about it," Orlando Brown Jr. says. "None of us were alive when Paul died (in 1991). But that's what this organization is all about. I know what my father means to me and what he meant to football. I really appreciate (Mike) letting us in. It was really special."

The football sons get it. Orlando Brown Jr., son of Zeus. Zac Taylor, son of Sherwood Taylor. Joe Burrow, son of Jimmy Burrow.

"When you've been around it your whole life," Joe Burrow says, "you just know what it takes to how it goes. You understand the life a little bit."

Everybody has a father. Rookie linebacker Demetrius Knight, born in Joe Burrow's century, is a father. He gets it, too.

"To hear it from a family member," Knight says, "it makes you appreciate it even more."

Mike Brown talking to his team means a new season. It turns out, this one starts when Burrow takes Mike Brown's team to Cleveland, of all places, to open the season on Sept. 7. Paul Brown's 117th birthday. That suddenly seems a lot closer than one of Mike Brown's biographies.

"Ohio people have a special connection," says Burrow of one Ohio State transfer to another. "And I'm proud to be here because of that."

View some of the top shots from Day 1 of Bengals Training Camp at Kettering Health Practice Fields, Wednesday, July 23, 2025.

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