Larry Brown, the unlikeliest Washington Redskins star

Things finally seemed to be going Ray McDonald’s way.

The tall, rangy back from Idaho had led the nation in rushing as a college senior, and then had been selected by the Washington Redskins in the first round of the 1967 NFL Draft. Injury and under-performance had plagued his first two seasons, but 1969 promised a change. The legendary Vince Lombardi was coming to Washington, bringing with him the power running style that had made national icons and Hall of Famers out of Paul Hornung and Jim Taylor. Surely Lombardi was the man to resurrect the athletically-gifted McDonald’s career. Of the other five backs on the roster, whose combined rushing total over more than ten cumulative seasons didn’t quite crack 2,000 yards, none seemed like a likely candidate to wrestle the job away from McDonald. Then again, Larry Brown may have been the least likely star running back the NFL has ever seen.

Brown had played two seasons of college ball for the moribund Kansas State Wildcats. Entering his senior year in 1968, the school had won nine games – in the entire decade. Brown helped them to a 4-6 record in ’68, their best in thirteen years. But it wasn’t as if Larry Brown was a star on that Wildcats squad. He was part of a three-headed running back committee, and the diminutive Mack Herron was the player everyone wanted to see. But the Redskins saw enough in Brown to select him in the eighth round of the 1969 draft. He was slated to battle it out with veterans Gerry Allen and Dave Kopay to backup McDonald.

But Lombardi noticed a couple of things about Brown from his earliest days in camp. Despite being almost half a foot shorter, and more than fifty pounds lighter than McDonald, the rookie showed two things that the bigger man didn’t seem to have. Indeed, very few backs have ever had these qualities to the extent that Larry Brown did.

First, Brown had a remarkable knack for knowing where to run. It was the old Lombardi concept of “running to daylight,” something that you can try to arrange in your schemes, but which is very difficult to teach. Larry Brown had what we now refer to as extraordinary vision. The other thing he had was a total lack of fear. I remember reading somewhere long ago that said he was never afraid of anything on the football field. He was only afraid when he’d have to come off the field and face Lombardi.

Lombardi noticed one other thing about his rookie. He seemed to have concentration problems. In practice, he would be late on the snap count one play, then jump early on the next. Most observers figured this was just typical rookie jitters, or a lack of concentration which plagued a lot of inexperienced players. But Lombardi had another suspicion – and this is the kind of observation that gets your name on the league’s most cherished trophy. He wondered if Larry Brown, the back with such great vision, could hear the snap count. Lombardi had Brown’s hearing tested, and sure enough, it turned up a problem. So the coach had a special helmet designed to amplify sound for Brown. Problem solved.

But not even Lombardi probably imagined what he was unleashing on the league. In his rookie year, running behind the recently-acquired blocking back par excellence Charlie Harraway, Larry Brown, who in his two years at Kansas State had rushed for fewer than 700 yards, caught 18 passes, and scored three touchdowns, took the NFL by storm, running for 888 yards, while notching 34 receptions and reaching the end zone four times. Though he lost out on Rookie of the Year to Cowboys rival Calvin Hill, Brown made the Pro Bowl, the first of four consecutive trips.

The Redskins were still predominantly a passing team in 1969, and Harraway shouldered a lot of the red zone and goal line workload. By the time George Allen took over the team in 1971 (after Lombardi’s death and one season under Bill Austin), Brown was front and center. He had run for more than 1,000 yards in 1970, the first Redskins player to ever cross that threshold. After a slight regression in 1971, he produced one of the finest years a back had ever had to that point in 1972. Almost 1,700 yards from scrimmage, rushing and receiving. Twelve touchdowns. And what makes it even more extraordinary is that he only played in twelve games. With the playoffs locked up, Allen rested Brown in the final two games. Had he played, he almost certainly would have broken Jim Brown’s record for most carries in a season, and he almost certainly would not have been passed by O.J. Simpson for the rushing title in the final week of the season. As it was, he won the league MVP and a host of other awards in 1972, and led the Redskins to their first Super Bowl.