Jim Brown

Verified Timeline

Lore & Background

Brown earned unanimous All-America honors playing college football at Syracuse University, where he was an all-around player when he played for the Syracuse Orangemen football team. The team later retired his number 44 jersey, and he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1995. He is also widely considered one of the greatest lacrosse players of all time, and the Premier Lacrosse League MVP Award is named in his honor. Brown also excelled in basketball and track and field. In his professional career, Brown carried the ball 2,359 times for 12,312 rushing yards and 106 touchdowns, which were all records when he retired. He averaged 104.3 rushing yards per game and is the only player in NFL history to average over 100 rushing yards per game for his career. Brown was enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1971. He was named to the NFL's 50th, 75th, and 100th Anniversary All-Time Teams, composed of the best players in NFL history. His number 32 jersey is retired by the Browns. Shortly before the end of his football career, Brown became an actor. He retired at the peak of his football career to pursue an acting career. He obtained 53 acting credits and several leading roles throughout the 1970s. He has been described as Hollywood's first black action hero and his role in the 1969 film 100 Rifles made cinematic history for featuring interracial love scenes. Brown was one of the few athletes, and among the most prominent African Americans, to speak out on racial issues as the civil rights movement was growing in the 1950s. He participated in the Cleveland Summit after Muhammad Ali faced imprisonment for refusing to enter the draft for the Vietnam War, and he founded the Black Economic Union to help promote economic opportunities for minority-owned businesses. Brown later launched a foundation focused on diverting at-risk youth from violence through teaching them life skills, through which he facilitated the Watts truce between rival street gangs in Los Angeles.

In Their Own Story

In the regular-season finale against Colgate, Brown rushed for 197 yards and scored six touchdowns while kicking seven extra points for a then-NCAA-record 43 points. Later that year in the Cotton Bowl, he rushed for 132 yards and scored three more touchdowns, though a blocked extra point after his third score cost Syracuse the game against TCU by a single point (28–27). In the NFL, his final Pro Bowl game ended with him scoring three touchdowns. His career concluded at its peak in 1965; shortly before retiring, he told a journalist about carrying the ball 749 times in three years and the physical toll it exacted. He left as the league's record holder for single-season rushing (1,863 yards), career rushing (12,312 yards), and all-purpose yards (15,549). The Browns retired his number 32 jersey immediately upon his departure.

Reader's Guide

Brown broke the single-season rushing record in 1958, gaining 1,527 yards in the 12-game season, shattering the previous NFL mark of 1,146 yards set by Steve Van Buren in 1949, as well as most rushing yards per game in a season, with 127.3. In this MVP season, Brown led all players with a staggering 17 touchdowns scored, beating his nearest rival, Baltimore Colts wide receiver Raymond Berry, by 8. After nine years in the NFL, he departed as the league's record holder for both single-season (1,863 in 1963) and career rushing (12,312 yards), as well as the all-time leader in rushing touchdowns (106), total touchdowns (126), and all-purpose yards (15,549). He was the first player to reach the 100-rushing-touchdowns milestone, and only a few others have done so since, despite the league's expansion to a 16-game season in 1978 and 17-game season in 2021 (Brown's first four seasons were only 12 games, and his last five were 14 games). Brown's record of scoring 100 touchdowns in only 93 games stood unt

Did You Know?

• Brown was selected in the ninth round of the 1957 NBA draft by the Syracuse Nationals with the 68th overall selection.
• In the ninth game of his rookie season, against the Los Angeles Rams he rushed for 237 yards, setting an NFL single-game record that stood unsurpassed for 14 years.
• Brown's 1,863 yards in 1963 was a single-season record, not a career record.
• The source states Brown led all players with 17 touchdowns in his 1958 MVP season, but does not specify that he had any receiving touchdowns that year.