Dec. 27, 1964 - Coach Blanton Collier (pictured after today’s game) of the Cleveland Browns and Galen Fiss, the Browns’ defensive captain, had the same summation of the Browns’ triumph over the Baltimore Colts in the NFL championship game today:
“It was our best defensive game of the year.”
“We had to count on our front four and knew that had to do it,” Fiss said.
The front four did it all right, putting pressure on the Colts’ quarterback, Johnny Unitas, and not giving him time to set up and throw.
“We had more blitzing than ever before,” said Bill Glass, one of the front four. “We even tried an all‐out blitz a couple of times, something that’s not characteristic of the Browns.”
The defensive coach, Nick Skorich, said the rushing didn’t allow Unitas to pick out his first receiver and made him look in a hurry for a secondary target.
The Cleveland defensive unit had yielded more yardage this year than any other team in the league.
Don Shula, the Baltimore coach, acknowledged that the Brown defense “did a heck of a job.”
But he insisted the Browns had shown him nothing new or anything he had not expected in the way of defense.
“They used a lot of man‐to-man coverage and mixed it up pretty well,” he said. “And they used a somewhat unusual spacing in the line, but they had shown it before. We just killed our own drives by giving up the ball twice on fumbles and twice on pass interceptions. We never gave our defense a break.”
Each member of the Browns will receive about $8,000 for having won the championship today. The losing Colts will get about $2,500 apiece less. The exact amounts will be announced later, but this will go down as the richest championship game in the 31‐year history of the NFL.
The crowd totaled 79,544, the second largest ever to see one of these contests. The record crowd, 85,693, dates back to the 1955 game in Los Angeles when the Browns beat the Rams, 38-14. That was Cleveland’s last NFL championship.
Today’s kitty was augmented by $1.8 million from the sale of television rights, and $720,000 of that went into the player pool. The $1.8 million represented the largest amount ever paid for televising a single sports event.
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