Pro Football History.com Blog

2025 NFL Draft: What to Expect as the Big Day Approaches

April 23rd, 2025

The 2025 NFL Draft is just around the corner, taking place from April 24 to April 26 in Green Bay, Wisconsin, at the legendary Lambeau Field. The first round kicks off on Thursday, April 24. NFL fans are eagerly anticipating the next wave of talent that could shape the future of their favorite teams. As fans gear up for the big event, sports enthusiasts are not only following their teams’ picks but also diving into the excitement of sports betting. Many fans are already buzzing with predictions, while others are getting excited and involved with NFL-themed games using platforms like Legalcasino to find the best sites to play.

Top prospects to watch

This year’s draft class is packed with standout talent. Some of the top prospects to watch include:

Travis Hunter (CB/WR, Colorado): Hunter’s dual-threat ability makes him one of the most exciting players in the draft, and many experts have him pegged as a top pick.
Abdul Carter (EDGE, Penn State): A dynamic edge rusher, Carter is drawing comparisons to Micah Parsons and is expected to have an immediate impact at the next level.
Ashton Jeanty (RB, Boise State): Known for his agility, Jeanty is among the top running back prospects and has a chance to make a big splash early in his career.
Tetairoa McMillan (WR, Arizona): A rising star, McMillan’s route-running skills make him one of the most exciting wide receivers to enter the NFL.
Shedeur Sanders (QB, Colorado): The son of Deion Sanders, Shedeur is already garnering attention as a potential first-round pick with his impressive poise and accuracy.

Draft experience in Green Bay

Fans attending the draft in Green Bay will enjoy a host of events throughout the city. The festivities will span the Titletown District and the Resch Complex, offering everything from live entertainment to exclusive fan experiences. The NFL Draft Theater, located near Lambeau Field, will serve as the focal point for the event, providing fans with a front-row seat to the selection process. Green Bay has truly transformed into a must-visit destination for football fans.

How to watch

For those who can’t attend, the draft will be broadcast live on ESPN and NFL Network, with the NFL OnePass app also providing exclusive coverage and updates. The draft promises to deliver moments of excitement and surprises for every football fan.

What’s at stake

For teams, the draft is a crucial opportunity to build for the future. With high-caliber talent like Carter and Sanders on the board, the stakes couldn’t be higher. As the season unfolds, teams that make strong draft choices could see themselves competing for a Super Bowl title in the near future.

Coaching Wins Leader: Part 3

April 14th, 2025

By Stephen Juza

As we continue our blog series that looks at coaching wins leaders to start their career, we pick up where we left off yesterday. After Paul Brown’s historic run with the Browns came to an end and a sluggish start to his career several years later with the Cincinnati Bengals, Brown was surpassed in wins by Don Shula. After a strong start to his career in Baltimore, Shula continued his career in Miami and surpassed Brown’s win total 220 games into his career.

Shula is the total career wins leader for coaches, and after a strong decade, nabbed the top spot from his former head coach, Brown. So, in today’s article, let us look at Shula’s NFL start through his 268 wins - when he was briefly caught as the wins leader to start a career.

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Shula’s NFL Beginning

Before Shula was an NFL coach, he was a player. After he graduated from college, the Cleveland Browns, coached by Paul Brown, drafted Shula in the ninth round, who would make the team as one of only two rookies for the team that year. Shula played in all twelve games his rookie year, including one start, en route to an NFL championship game appearance.

However, his next season did not start as planned. The following year, he was called up to active military duty as a member of the Ohio Army National Guard and served briefly in Ohio and Louisiana until he returned to Cleveland in November. With five games left in the season, he returned to the team as a full-time starter for the injury-riddled team, with the season ending in another championship game loss.

In 1953, he was traded to the newest franchise in the NFL, the Baltimore Colts where he played until the 1956 season. After two back-to-back championship appearances with the Browns, Shula’s remaining career was far less successful. In his four seasons in Baltimore, the team was never able to achieve a winning record. Shula finished his NFL career with one more season in Washington, another losing record, before finally retiring from the NFL.

After his playing career ended, Shula entered the coaching ranks, first in college, before moving on to the NFL. After several years as an NFL assistant, he had his first opportunity to lead a team - his former team, the Baltimore Colts.

Baltimore Colts

In 1963, Shula began his hall of fame career in Baltimore, but he did not burst on to the season in his inaugural season like his former coach. His first year, the team went 8-6, good for third in the conference. However, his second season was far more successful, and a sign of what could come. 1964 saw the team finish with a record of 12-2, winning the NFL West division, but falling short of a championship with a loss against his former team, the Browns.

Throughout the sixties, he continued to build the Colts into a championship-contending squad. By the 1969 season, his final in Baltimore, the team had finished first in the NFL four times, and second three other times. His best year in Baltimore was 1968, an impressive 13-1 season where the team won the NFL championship but fell to Joe Namath and the AFL Champion New York Jets.

After the 1969 season, Shula left the Colts after receiving a lucrative offer from the Miami Dolphins, a wide-ranging deal that included the role of general manager and an equity stake in the franchise. However, due to the process the Dolphins went through, they were penalized by the NFL for tampering with Shula, and the team lost their first-round draft pick the following season. However, it was a trade the team was happy to make.

Miami Dolphins

While he finished his Colts career with an impressive winning percentage over 75%, along with countless championship appearances, it was in Miami where Shula’s career went from great to legendary. Entering his first season in Miami, he had the fourth-most wins through ninety-eight games to start a career, thirteen behind Brown. It took Shula most of the decade to catch his former mentor, which he did with his 161st win. But it was a wildly successful decade to get there.

The Dolphins 1972 season was one for the record books. Shula’s third season in Florida saw the team complete a perfect 14-0 regular season, en route to Shula’s first Super Bowl victory in his career. In addition to winning every single game, the team led the league in points scored on offense, and fewest points allowed on defense. Overall, this team was ranked #1 on the NFL’s list of greatest teams for the league's 100th anniversary.

The team followed up a perfect season with another spectacular season, 12-2 with Shula’s second Super Bowl victory. While that would be the last Super Bowl victory of his career, consistent success was a mark of the years to follow. In 1978, Shula caught up to Brown on the Wins through X Games chart.

In this cart above, each column represents the “Ones” digit, while each row represents the “Tens” digit into a coach's career.

For more than 150 games, Shula held the record despite the dropping win percentage. During the 11-year run at the top, his win percentage was more than ten percentage points below his career average (74% compared to 63.5%). However, it took a historic run from another coach and dynasty to surpass Shula, however briefly.

We will profile this coach in Part 4 of our series.

Coaching Wins Leader: Part 2

April 13th, 2025

By Stephen Juza

In yesterday’s article, we began looking at the coaching career wins leaders to begin a career. No one started hotter out of the gate than Jim Caldwell of the Indianapolis Colts, but his time in the limelight was short-lived. After a brief, dominating run through two seasons, the bottom fell out from the Colts when a neck injury sidelined quarterback Peyton Manning, leading to his firing at the end of the season.

George Seifert was the next coach to take the crown, guiding the 49ers dynasty to new heights and leading the transition from one hall of famer quarterback, Joe Montana, to another hall of fame quarterback, Steve Young. Seifert’s run was similarly short-lived as Caldwell’s, who was soon surpassed by Paul Brown of the eponymous Cleveland Browns. This is where we begin today’s blog, mid-Brown’s dynasty at 101 games into Brown’s NFL career.

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In this cart above, each column represents the “Ones” digit, while each row represents the “Tens” digit into a coach's career.

Game 101-238 - Paul Brown’s Domination

In yesterday’s article, we talked about Brown taking over the career leaders spot at 33 games into his career, amidst a remarkable run in the AAFC that led to four straight championships. His success lasted much longer than just the AAFC, with him holding the undisputed top spot from games thirty-three until 218.

So, what made him so good? Today, we look at the countless inventions and strategies that Brown implemented throughout his career, and how it shaped the modern NFL that we know and love today.

Inventions

Brown is credited with many inventions, both on and off the field. One merely cosmetic invention that he helped implement is the modern facemask. In the earlier days of the NFL, helmets had no facemask to protect players.

While players started wearing some form of a facemask as in the 1930s, Brown would help develop and patent the material that led to the initial single-bar facemask that debuted in 1954. From there, further development has shaped the helmet into what we know and recognize today. This modern football helmet also has a radio-receiver in it to help facilitate communication between the quarterback and the coaching staff. Guess who was one of the first coaches to trial this technology. Paul Brown.

During the 1956 season, Brown worked with a local electronics salesman to help fashion a device to radio in plays to his offense. While there were issues and controversy with his initial implementation of the receiver, NFL commissioner Bert Bell eventually banned the technology.

Strategies

Brown also took an academic approach to his coaching as well. This included the fact that he was one of the first coaches to study game films, of both his team and of the opponents. He was not just collecting tendencies through film; he was also the first coach to place an assistant coach in the press box during the game to collect information to then relay this back to the entire coaching staff.

Oh, and regarding the coaching staff? Brown was the first head coach to hire a full-time coaching staff when he was hired to lead the Cleveland Browns. It’s no wonder that the Browns left everyone in the dust during the four-year run of the AAFC.

While we may not be able to visualize what the NFL looked like before Brown, it also extends to what types of plays may have been called. One such play that seems almost rudimentary to imagine a game without is the draw play - faking a pass play and then handing it off to a running back.

The End of Paul Brown's Reign

All good things must end though, and Brown’s run in Cleveland ended in 1962. Brown re-emerged in Cincinnati a few years later, but the magic was gone. He lost his status as the record-holder to Don Shula during his first season in Cincinnati, a 3-11 campaign that was his worst NFL season to date. At 160 games into a coaching career, Brown had company at the top, with Shula passing him at Game 161.

Coaching Wins Leaders to Begin Career

By Stephen Juza,

April 12th, 2025

Last week, the NFL Competition Committee voted to recognize statistics from the All-American Football Conference (AAFC) as their own. While the AAFC was only around for a mere four years before having the top teams absorbed into the NFL (while the rest of the teams were divided up amongst the remaining teams), this act does reshape some aspects of the NFL record book.

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One notable inclusion is Paul Brown’s early dominance with the Cleveland Browns. Four seasons that lead to four championships in the AAFC before continuing the team’s dominance into the NFL. Few coaches have seen that amount of early success, so in today’s blog we thought we would look at the coaching career wins leader through the first X number of games in their career, starting with the first 100 games of their career.

In this cart above, each column represents the “Ones” digit, while each row represents the “Tens” digit into a coach's career.

Games 1-14: Jim Caldwell Sets the Standard

Lots of coaches start their career with a win streak. In fact, 180 coaches to date have won their first-ever NFL game as a head coach. As the weeks continue, the list of undefeated coaches shrinks by about half, until we have our first ever sole career wins leader at 9-0 to start his career in Jim Caldwell.

Caldwell may have started his head coaching career in about as great of circumstances as possible. The long-time quarterbacks coach for the Colts inherited a winning team from Hall of Fame coach Tony Dungy, with future Hall of Fame quarterback Peyton Manning behind center. With an offense loaded to the brim with talent, and a defense full of playmakers, Caldwell’s first season was record-breaking. The 2009 Colts started the season incredibly hot, eventually getting to 14-0 before the question that always follows a playoff-clinching win. Would Caldwell rest key players down the stretch?

The answer would be “yes”. While Manning and others sat considerable portions of the final two games, the offense was dismal behind backup quarterback Curtis Painter, who completed eight of twenty eight passes in the final two games of the season. The Colts would ultimately drop both games, ending Caldwell’s record of 14 wins to start the season as the mark to beat for any coach. While the season started hot for the Colts, it unfortunately ended in disappointment at the hands of the New Orleans Saints in the Super Bowl.

Games 16-30: George Seifert Takes the Crown

While Caldwell sat the starters for the final two games of the 2009 season, his run as the wins leader ended at 15 games into his career when others caught up. While a total of six coaches have started their coaching career 14-2, George Seifert emerges as the next record holder by his 20th game.

If Caldwell started in great circumstances, that may pale in comparison to the team that Seifert took over. Seifert inherited a team that had just won the Super Bowl (with three wins in the prior eight years). While Seifert had been the team’s defensive coordinator during their run, the offensive talent was loaded: Joe Montana at quarterback, throwing passes to Jerry Rice and Dwight Clark, and handing the ball off to Roger Craig. No matter which direction the opposing defense looked, All-Pro or Hall of Famers were making plays.

Seifert started his head coaching career with a Super Bowl victory in his first season, followed by a loss in the conference championship in his second, at one point reaching 27 wins in his first 30 games. But a loss in Week 15 to the Saints would allow the next coach to step up and tie Seifert’s remarkable pace to begin his career.

Games 31-100: Paul Brown’s Sustained Dominance

While Seifert may have had the best two seasons to start a career, it pales in comparison to the sustained success of Paul Brown. With the incorporation of the AAFC record books into NFL history, the league recognizes the Cleveland Browns success during the late 40s. With that recognition, Paul Brown holds the record of career wins through X games from 33 games through the end of the chart (100 games).

Last week, we wrote how the Browns dominance over the fledgling league partly led to the downfall of the AAFC. Four seasons, four championships. But the Browns dominance didn’t end there. Even after the Browns joined the NFL (game 53 in the above chart), Brown and the Browns kept the winning vibes going, winning three NFL championships in the first decade in the NFL. Not only that, they appeared in every championship game from 1950-1955. Overall, there would be only a single losing season for Brown in Cleveland, a 5-7 showing in 1956.

Over the next week, we will continue the deep dive into the career wins record through X game into a coaches career.

Brief History of the AAFC

By Stephen Juza,

April 5th, 2025

This last week, the NFL announced that statistics from the All-America Football Conference (AAFC) would now be incorporated into their official record books. While this short-lived league only lasted for four years in the aftermath of World War 2, it produced some revolutionary football that impacted the NFL history books. Now, the statistics from those four years will be incorporated into the NFL books for good. In the upcoming blog series, we look at several ways the integrated history books now are influenced by the addition of the AAFC records.

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But first, what was the AAFC?

The Founding of the All American Football Conference

In 1944, in the midst of WWII, the idea for a new rival league to the NFL was created. This was not the first time people had tried to start a competing league to the NFL - but it was arguably the first successful league. In fact, there were two other rival leagues that were beginning the very same year. However, both the United States Football League and the Trans-America Football League would fold the next year.

Not the AAFC, however. Waiting until after the war ended, the new league and their eight teams began play in the fall of 1946. There were many reasons why the AAFC was better positioned than the failed competitor leagues.

With the war ending, many young men were returning to the USA after serving overseas. Some of these men played in military teams, and despite having college eligibility, could have opted for professional teams instead. The rapid influx of potential players allowed for the increase in competitive teams, almost overnight.

Additionally, commercial air travel was now an option, allowing the league to spread out. Earlier leagues, such as the Ohio Valley League (1925-1929) or the American Football League (1934) basically had to have teams that were accessible in a day by road or by train. Even the NFL from just a decade before only had teams as far west as Green Bay, and as far south as Philadelphia. From the very beginning, the AAFC put a team in Miami and San Francisco.

1946: League Play Begins

While there were many successes for the league right out of the gate, it was not smooth sailing for everyone. While the first season was played with the Miami Seahawks, it was a disastrous initial, and only, season for the franchise. Hurricanes, poor performance, and dismal ticket sales led to the team’s bankruptcy after only one season. However, outside of Miami, there was a lot to celebrate for the new league.

The Cleveland Browns were the definition of excellence for the brief run of the AAFC. They played the first ever game in AAFC history, a 44-0 dismantling of the Miami Seahawks that set the standard for the Browns success. Cleveland went on to win the AAFC championship that season, defeating the New York Yankees 14-9.

But beyond the Browns, many of the teams had stronger attendance than comparable NFL teams, which initially bid the upstart league well. Unfortunately, there was a major competition gap between the best teams (e.g. Cleveland) and the worst teams (e.g. Miami). This would eventually help to lead to the demise of the league.

1947: Financial Struggles Emerge

As with the early NFL days, financial success was not a given. The Miami Seahawks folded after a single season, and several teams played in front of an increasing number of empty seats during the league’s second season. But the top of the league remained strong and stable, with the Cleveland Browns winning the championship again over the New York Yankees. No team in either league drew more fans than the Cleveland Browns as residents turned out to support their championship-winning team.

1948: Cleveland Continues to Dominate

One of the issues with the AAFC was that the top of the league may have been too good relative to the competition. By the time the third season rolled around, the Browns had won both championships over the Yankees, and nothing would change in 1948. Their main rival in the Western division was the San Francisco 49ers, finishing second to the Browns each year (and thus out of the postseason). However, they hoped 1948 would be different.

Both the Browns and the 49ers entered their Week 10 showdown undefeated. A record 82,769 fans as the 49ers kick returner fumbled the opening kickoff, leading to a Browns touchdown a mere three plays later on an Otto Graham QB keeper. The 49ers would rebound, scoring a touchdown on their next drive, but the Browns would deliver the decisive points to win on their first drive of the second half, a 14-7 defensive struggle.

By the end of the 14-game schedule, the Browns would emerge victorious each game, logging only the third perfect season in pro football history.

1949: League Dissolution and the NFL Merger

Financial struggles were plaguing both leagues, and serious talks of merging with the NFL ramped up. One of the sticking points was how many teams were going to join the league. While the top of the AAFC was very strong, the bottom of the league left a lot to be desired. Not only that, but there were several teams in the AAFC that were in direct geographical competition with the NFL.

Chicago already had two NFL teams (Cardinals and the Bears), they didn’t want a third (Hornets) from the AAFC. Same with New York (Giants and the Bulldogs) sharing the same space with the Yankees (AAFC). In Los Angeles, the NFL had the Rams. They didn’t also need the Dons. However, the league would have happily taken the Browns and the 49ers.

The final deal also included bringing the Baltimore Colts over in the merger, while the Dons merged with the Rams. The remaining teams folded, a footnote in the history of professional football. Meanwhile, with the merger deal behind them, the final AAFC championship game took place, with the Browns beating their new NFL companion, the 49ers, 21-7.

Initial Impact on NFL History

Cleveland felt they could compete with the best of the NFL, and they quickly proved it. After winning all four AAFC championships, they continued their winning ways with three NFL championships in their first six years in the new league. In addition, they won their conference championship seven of their first eight years in the NFL.

The 49ers were clearly the second best team in AAFC history, but they did not have the same immediate success when they joined the NFL like the Browns. It took them more than 20 years before they won their first playoff game in their new league, but that was still a better result than the third team included in the merger - the Baltimore Colts.

The team that the NFL didn’t want to take showed almost right away why they should have folded with the other teams. Having never achieved a winning record in the AAFC, the Colts continued their losing ways in 1950, their first and only NFL season. The team finished 1-11, dead last in the league, and they folded due to financial pressure, becoming the last team to ever be contracted by the NFL.