Go west, young Rams

Sporting News, The, Jan 23, 1995 by Steve Gietschier

The scoring opened on a freak play. Baugh dropped into his end zone, but his pass hit the goal post, then located on the goal line. Under the rules of the day, this was a safety -- 2-0, Cleveland. Then, Baugh was knocked out of the game with bruised ribs.

In the second quarter, Washington scored on a touchdown pass from Frank Filchock to Steve Bagarus, and Cleveland came back as Waterfield hit Benton with a TD pass. Waterfield's point-after kick hit the crossbar, bounced up in the air and dropped over to give the Rams a 9-7 lead at the half.

Cleveland scored again in the third quarter on a pass from Waterfield to Jim Gillette, but this time, the extra-point attempt went wide. It was 15-7, and the Redskins cut that margin to a single point with a touchdown pass from Filchock to Bob Seymour. But in the fourth quarter Washington's kicker, Joe Aguirre, missed a pair of fieldgoal attempts, and the Rams held on to win.

Even before the title game, Reeves knew he would be challenged in 1946 by the presence of the Cleveland Browns, a new team in a new league. The All-America Football Conference, the brainchild of Arch Ward, sports editor of the Chicago Tribune and the man behind baseball's All-Star Game and the College Football All-Star Game (matching college players against the previous year's NFL champs), was set to play with teams in New York, Brooklyn, Buffalo, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Cleveland.

Reeves decided not to fight. As soon as he received league approval to move, he approached officials of the Los Angeles Coliseum, an exclusive bastion of amateur sport, to let his Rams use their stadium. A deal was struck as Reeves promised to play one exhibition game each year with the proceeds going to charity. Reeves invited the Redskins to inaugurate this affair, and in the rematch, the Los Angeles Rams won, 16-14, before nearly 95,000.

Los Angeles added four players to its 1946 roster, all of whom were bound to attract fans. Tom Harmon, the 1940 Heisman Trophy winner at Michigan, had just gotten out of Army. Jim Hardy had played quarterback at Southern California. Two UCLA graduates, Woody Strode and Kenny Washington, made headlines as the first African Americans in the NFL since 1933.

Reeves was an innovator in other ways, too. He became the first pro football owner to employ a full-time scouting staff for evaluating college players. He charged into an arrangement to televise Rams home games, protected by a sponsor's guarantee when attendance fell below a predetermined level. He adopted halfback Fred Gehrke's idea to paint the team's helmets blue and add a bright yellow ram's born as the league's first insignia. And he hired a couple of pretty good executives along the way in Pete Rozelle and Tex Schramm.

The Rams did not win a division title for Los Angeles until 1949, and they lost the title game to the Eagles, 14-0. The next season, they got to return to Cleveland for the first time since their departure to play the Browns, a team that had ripped through the AAFC, winning four titles in four years with a combined 51-4-3 record. The new league went belly up after that, but three teams -- the Browns, San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Colts -- joined the NFL.