Football Career
Owen served in the U.S. Army training corps in World War I, then returned to coach for a year at Phillips before going to work in oil fields in various parts of the Southwest. He started to play pro football in 1924, at $50 a game, for the NFL's Kansas City Cowboys (who played all their games on the road!). After playing for the Cowboys and then the Cleveland Bulldogs in 1925, he was sold to the New York Giants in 1926 for $500, joining his brother Bill. After a futile attempt to get a cut of the purchase price from Kansas City coach Leroy Andrews, he later said of the sale:
I had seen a lot of fat hogs go for more than they paid for me. But in those days, a fat hog was a lot more valuable than a fat tackle. I was going to New York even if I had to walk there.His leadership became clearly evident during the 1927 NFL season as captain of a team that outscored opponents 197–20, went 11-1-1 and won the NFL title.
In 1930, he was promoted to co-player-coach for the final two games of the season with another future Hall of Famer, Benny Friedman. The 2–0 finish was a premonition of Owen's future long-term success as sole head coach starting the following season, accepting the position under a unique arrangement: he never signed a contract, but had a handshake agreement with the long-term owners, the Mara family. He retired as a player following the 1931 NFL season except for a brief comeback in 1933, helping the Giants go 11–3 and get to the title game, the first of eight appearances the Giants would make during his tenure.
The team slipped to 8–5 in 1934, but still made the NFL championship game again. Facing the 13–0 Chicago Bears, the Giants came in as huge underdogs and trailed 13–3 at halftime. The icy conditions and 9°F weather led to an adjustment between halves that became a memorable part of National Football League lore. A friend of the Maras owned a nearby shoe warehouse, and opened it on that freezing Sunday afternoon to supply the entire team with new sneakers for better footing on the frozen turf than they had had with conventional cleats, enabling them to run off 17 unanswered points in the second half for a 30–13 win and the team's first title. More than seven decades later, the contest is still remembered as "the sneakers game."
Despite the institution of the NFL draft due to the continued dominance of the Bears and Giants, the Giants returned to the championship game in 1935 and won their second and last title under Owen in 1938, 23-17 over the Green Bay Packers despite being outgained in yardage 379–208, with nine points on two blocked punts the margin of victory. New York appeared in four more season-ending NFL title clashes under Owen, but lost them all. An early World War II Three Stooges short referred to them when Moe sarcastically asked a hulking adversary, "Did you ever play footborl for da Giants?!"
In 1950, the Giants faced a powerful new foe with the arrival of the All-America Football Conference champion Cleveland Browns, who consigned them to runner-up finishes in each of the next three seasons although Owen's "umbrella defense" that shut down passing attacks made life miserable for the first-place Browns as New York won four of their six regular-season meetings, but dropped a defensive playoff struggle with them after finishing tied with the Browns for the Eastern Division title at the end of the 1950 season by the baseball-like score of 8-3 (thanks to a Cleveland safety) for the privilege of meeting the Western Division champion Los Angeles Rams in the title game, which the Browns won by two points on a go-ahead field goal in the closing seconds after trailing virtually the entire game.
Read more about this topic: Steve Owen (American Football)
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