During his 13-year NFL career, Frank Ryan completed passes for 149 touchdowns, made three trips to the Pro Bowl, and led the original Cleveland Browns to the 1964 NFC title, which they won with three touchdowns in the second half.
It was the last major professional championship that Cleveland would see for 52 years, until the Cavaliers’ N.B.A. Championship victory over the Golden State Warriors in June 2016. Fans of the Browns are still pining for a Super Bowl victory.
However, Ryan’s accomplishments outside of the football field were also honored when he passed away on Monday at the age of 87. Ryan, a backup quarterback at Rice University in Houston, was granted a degree in mathematics six months following the Browns’ 27-0 championship triumph over the Baltimore Colts.
While playing for the Browns, he was a mathematics professor at the Case Institute of Technology, which is now known as Case Western Reserve University. He later taught math at Yale and Rice.
As the United States House of Representatives’ director of information systems during the majority of the 1970s, he brought the world of computers to the conservative chamber and developed an electronic voting system while managing a team of more than 200. He spent ten years as Yale’s athletic director before moving on to become Rice’s fund-raising executive and senior planning administrator.
Ryan’s varied vocations piqued the interest of sportswriters. They couldn’t help but use the title of his doctoral dissertation, “A Characterization of the Set of Asymptotic Values of a Function Holomorphic in the Unit Disc,” to portray him as the quarterback of the thinking person.
Ryan rejected claims that he was a genius who used his intelligence to identify holes in defensive alignments on football Sundays, saying he couldn’t explain what that meant to somebody who wasn’t familiar with complex mathematics.
“A quarterback can definitely benefit from having an analytical mind,” he said in 1965 to Roger Kahn of The Saturday Evening Post. However, those who argue that having a mathematical mind is crucial are simply not very knowledgeable about the subject. My actions on the field and my academic work are completely unrelated.
Ryan passed away at a Waterford, Connecticut, healthcare facility from problems related to Alzheimer’s disease, according to his son Frank B. Ryan Jr., also known as Pancho.
On July 12, 1936, Francis Beall Ryan was born in Fort Worth. He played quarterback in high school and became interested in engineering and physics.
In the Southwest Conference, he played for Rice in 1956 and 1957, primarily providing backup for King Hill, the 1958 first-round pick of the NFL draft by the Chicago Cardinals. In Rice’s 1958 Cotton Bowl matchup against Navy, Ryan entered the game late and completed a touchdown pass to help the Owls lose 20–7 after Hill struggled early.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in physics, Ryan was selected in the fifth round of the draft by the Los Angeles Rams. During his first four NFL seasons, he played irregularly for the Rams while pursuing a master’s degree in mathematics.
After being acquired by the Browns in 1962, he had a successful football career. He established himself as a regular when Jim Ninowoski, the team’s primary quarterback, suffered an injury.
However, Paul Brown, the team’s founder and coach, employed a “messenger” system in which he rotated guards to inform the quarterback what plays he wanted, with no deviation allowed, so Ryan was not able to think much or improvise during his first season with Cleveland.
Ryan told Sports Illustrated, “I didn’t turn mathematics off during the season, but I tuned it down.” “It was once said by Brown, Ryan, you really ought to sharpen your pencil for football.”
After Brown was fired as coach in 1963, Blanton Collier gave Ryan a lot of freedom to organize the team’s strategy. Ryan led the Browns to four postseason appearances during his seven seasons with the team, becoming one of the NFL’s most accurate quarterbacks and a long throw specialist.
Ryan led the Browns to the championship game for a second straight season after the 1964 game, when coach Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers defeated them despite fullback Jim Brown’s 114-yard touchdown run to go along with Ryan’s three touchdown passes to receiver Gary Collins.
Ryan was 6 feet 3 inches and 200 pounds, with a build ideal for a professional quarterback of his period, although premature graying gave him the air of the venerable academic he would eventually become. Even though he was a professional football player, he blended in with his colleagues’ camaraderie despite studying game footage in great detail. His off-field lifestyle was definitely strange.
After the 1968 season, Ryan was cut loose by the Browns and signed with the Washington Redskins (formerly the Washington Commanders), who had brought Lombardi on board as general manager and coach. Ryan saw very little play during his two seasons as Sonny Jurgensen’s backup, one under Coach Lombardi and the other under Coach Bill Austin following Lombardi’s death from cancer in September 1970.
Ryan finished his career with 16,042 passing yards and a 51.1 percent completion percentage. From 1964 to 1966, he was selected to the Pro Bowl for each season. Additionally, in 1964 and 1966, he had the most touchdown passes in the NFL—25 and 29, respectively.
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