Blanton Collier - High School and Assistant Coaching Career

High School and Assistant Coaching Career

Collier went to work at Paris High School in 1928 as a mathematics teacher and coached several of the school's sports teams. He got the nickname "George" when he was a teacher because he affectionately called most of his male students "George" and most of his female students "Martha". He married Mary Varder from Paris in 1930 and spent 16 years working at the high school before enlisting in the U.S. Navy in 1943 during World War II. Collier's Paris football team had an overall win-loss-tie record of 73–50–10. Collier was 37 years old when he joined the military; although he likely could have avoided enlisting because he was a teacher and had a family, he felt serving in the war was his duty.

Collier was assigned to the Great Lakes Naval Training Station outside of Chicago, where he was a survival swimming instructor. It was in the Navy that Collier first had trouble with his hearing, a problem that dogged him later in life. He was once called to report to his ship over a loudspeaker but did not hear it. Doctors thought his hearing may have been damaged by teaching swimming in a tidal pool or from practicing on the shooting range. "It never became an issue until the Navy, when they figured he had less than 40% of a normal person's hearing," his daughter Kay Collier-Slone said in 1997. To compensate for his hearing loss, Collier became an expert lip-reader.

At Great Lakes, Collier went regularly to observe the practices of the station's service football team, the Great Lakes Bluejackets. There he met Paul Brown, who had left a head coaching job at Ohio State University to serve in the Navy and lead the Bluejackets team. Collier took notes and hoped to pick up some football knowledge he could use when he returned to Paris. Brown, however, noticed Collier's dedication and brought him onto his staff as a volunteer assistant.

In 1945, Brown was hired by Arthur B. McBride as the first coach of the Cleveland Browns, a team under formation in the new All-America Football Conference (AAFC). Brown hired Collier as a backfield coach for the team, which was set to begin play in 1946. Initially his specialty was pass defense, but Brown soon rewarded Collier's extensive football knowledge with a broader assistant coaching assignment.

Collier served under Brown from 1946 to 1953, a period in which the team won all four titles in the AAFC before moving to the National Football League (NFL) in 1950. That season the Browns captured the NFL title and then reached but lost the following three championship games. Collier's coaching style was the opposite of Brown's; Brown was a disciplinarian whose stern nature and aloofness often brought him into conflict with players, while Collier was a friendly, warm man whose patience and studiousness endeared him to players. "Everything had to be perfect; he was a stickler on perfection – but at the same time, he had great patience," Browns quarterback Otto Graham said in 2007. After the 1946 season, Brown asked Collier to analyze every play run by the offense, and Collier came up with a detailed breakdown of why each play succeeded or failed. This was the genesis of an annual grading system Collier developed to evaluate players' performance. The Browns used it for many years.