Welcome to the NFL 100, The Athletic’s endeavor to identify the 100 best players in football history. You can order the book version here. Every day until the season begins, we’ll unveil new members of the list, with the No. 1 player to be crowned on Wednesday, Sept. 8.
There’s a cool, life-sized statue of Paul Warfield outside his old high school stadium in Warren, Ohio. The bronze statue is flanked by two granite panels listing Warfield’s accomplishments. Those have a heavy Ohio flavor, beginning with his days at Warren G. Harding High through Ohio State and his home-state Cleveland Browns.
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In truth, they probably could have used a third panel to chronicle all the highlights of one of the NFL’s great wide receivers.
Warfield took a couple of southern detours along the way, including three Super Bowl appearances (and two victories) with the Miami Dolphins and a brief stop in Memphis in the failed World Football League. But all roads led back to Ohio, where Warfield finished his career with the Browns and where he has two permanent bronze tributes — the statue in Warren and a bust in Canton at the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Enrolling my oldest to my high school, had to show my kids the statue of the Warren,Ohio’s own Paul Warfield! pic.twitter.com/HYwpiL8rmc
— MaimeSon (@RobertMcCall330) June 30, 2021
“He was,” said Gil Brandt, the Dallas Cowboys’ longtime personnel director, “as good as anybody that’s ever come into the NFL.”
Warfield is a Hall of Famer, a Super Bowl champion and a home-state hero. But for Brandt, Warfield will always be the One that Got Away.
Warfield was a “60-minute man” at Ohio State, where he played both ways as a running back and a cornerback. He also competed for the Buckeyes’ track team, finishing second in the long jump at the NCAA championships as a sophomore.
Halfway through Warfield’s senior season, legendary Ohio State coach Woody Hayes moved Warfield to end. Warfield caught 22 passes for 266 yards and three touchdowns in 1963 while playing in a Buckeyes’ offense that still relied heavily on the running game.
“Woody’s pass offense was far from being refined,” Brandt said. “They ran an 8-yard square out and a 6-yard square in.”
Paul Warfield at a glance
Position: Receiver | 2-time All-Pro |
8 seasons with Browns | 8-time Pro Bowler |
5 seasons with Dolphins | 3-time NFL champion |
Hall of Fame class: 1983 |
That was probably the reason most NFL and AFL teams who sent scouts to Columbus were interested in Warfield as a defensive back. Not Brandt, who asked Hayes if he could come to practice and watch Warfield go through receiver drills.
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Instead, Hayes wanted Brandt to look at tight end Greg Lashutka, who would later become Columbus’ mayor. “They throw (Lashutka) about four passes and he drops about two,” Brandt said.
Brandt thought Warfield’s size (6-feet, 188 pounds) and speed would play well at wide receiver, and told Warfield the Cowboys were going to draft him in the first round.
“We drafted on a Monday morning from Chicago. We were going to use him as a wide receiver. We had a deal cut,” Brandt said. “On Monday morning, coach (Tom) Landry said to me: ‘You’re not gonna be very happy with me. We’ve just traded our first choice to Pittsburgh for (wideout) Buddy Dial.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m sorry to hear that because I thought Paul was going to be a really great player.’”
Two days after the Bills selected Warfield in the fourth round of the AFL draft, the NFL’s Browns took him with the 11th pick and brought him and the other draft picks in a couple of months later for what was the NFL’s first-ever minicamp. Warfield lined up at both receiver and cornerback during the one-day minicamp, and wasn’t sure which would be his primary position until he arrived at Cleveland’s training camp that summer.
As Warfield was unloading his car, he was summoned to the coaches’ offices, where head coach Blanton Collier told Warfield he was a wide receiver. Warfield spent the next month learning the position in a crash course with the late Browns wideout Ray Renfro, who was then the team’s receivers coach.
“He was to be my instructor, teacher or guru, if you will,” Warfield told The Athletic. “Over a period of four weeks roughly, he taught me fundamentally the art of pass-pattern execution (and) at that point, really made me as a wide receiver. …
“I improved on a few things. But from a fundamental standpoint and concept, I never varied one iota for the most part from what Ray Renfro taught me.”
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Clearly, it stuck.
As a rookie, Warfield caught a career-high 52 passes in an offense built around running back Jim Brown, who Warfield called the greatest runner in NFL history. With Brown gaining nearly 1,500 yards on the ground and Warfield totaling 920 through the air (with nine touchdowns), the Browns rolled to the 1964 championship game. There they blanked the Colts, 27-0.
After an injury limited him to one game in 1965, Warfield returned and had four consecutive seasons with at least 700 receiving yards. The stretch included the only 1,000-yard season of his career in 1968, when he led the league with 12 touchdown catches.
The Browns were winning. Warfield was playing for his childhood team in a city 50 miles northwest of his hometown. Life was good.
And then Browns owner Art Modell traded him to Miami.
“It was a surprise. I had just completed my sixth year and I was comfortable,” Warfield said in a recent, 30-minute phone interview. “I was being traded from a legitimate, contending and championship team — that I played with in ’64 — of the National Football League, to an expansion team out of the American Football League, which at that point was not considered to be quite on par.”
To acquire Warfield, the Dolphins sent Cleveland the No. 3 pick in the 1970 draft, which the Browns used to select Purdue quarterback Mike Phipps.
In seven seasons with the Browns, Phipps finished with two times as many interceptions (80) as touchdowns (40) before being traded to the Bears in 1977 for first- and fourth-round picks. They later used the first-round pick to get Ozzie Newsome. Meanwhile, Warfield cemented his place as one of the game’s greatest players with five consecutive Pro Bowl berths and two All-Pro selections in Miami.
Despite playing in a run-dominant offense that featured a trio of talented backs in Larry Csonka, Mercury Morris and Jim Kiick, Warfield was quarterback Bob Griese’s go-to receiver when Dolphins coach Don Shula decided to air it out.
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“We were a running team. If he’d been on one of these other teams that threw the ball 40, 45 times a game, his stats would have been way up there,” Griese told The Athletic in a phone interview. “And Warfield never complained about that. He was all-in for that. So you talk about a real team guy that had all of the abilities to get open and catch the ball and run.”
When Warfield would run routes for Griese after practice, he would adjust his patterns as if he was facing double coverage – “because he never got single coverage,” Griese said.
According to Griese, Warfield’s blocking ability was an oft-overlooked part of his game.
“He wouldn’t go for the cheap shots, blindside,” Griese said. “He’d hit everybody up around their shoulders. And when he hit you, you went down. You ask a bunch of defensive backs, a bunch of safeties, about who was the best blocking wide receiver, and I’m sure they would say Warfield during that era when he played.”
The Dolphins made the first of three consecutive Super Bowl appearances after the 1971 regular season, and picked up a new fan along the way. As the Dolphins were preparing to face Dallas in Super Bowl VI at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans, President Richard Nixon — who had a compound in Key Biscayne, Fla. — reportedly called Shula to suggest he call a down-and-in for Warfield against the Cowboys.
“I said, ‘Yeah, that’s a good idea,’” the late Shula told Yahoo Sports in 2013.
“He was referring to that slant-in pattern,” Warfield said, “and suggesting to Don Shula — which we would have utilized anyway — that we emphasize that pattern.”
Griese threw the slant to Warfield on the Dolphins’ eighth offensive play, but it was knocked down by Mel Renfro for an incompletion. Dallas would go on to win, 24-3.
But Miami won back-to-back titles beginning in 1972, which Warfield pointed to as his most memorable season, despite his modest, 29-catch total. No wonder: The Dolphins made history with an undefeated season in which they rushed for a then-record 2,960 yards and attempted only 259 passes, which ranked near the bottom of the league statistically.
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Miami turned to backup quarterback Earl Morrall for nine games in ’72 after Griese was injured. Still, Warfield averaged 20.9 yards a catch and made the Pro Bowl.
Following the third Super Bowl, Warfield, Csonka and Kiick left Miami for what was then considered big money in the WFL. (Warfield’s deal was worth $220,000, according to the Los Angeles Times). All three joined the Memphis Southmen, but didn’t make it through one season before the league folded.
Warfield returned to Cleveland, retiring at 35 following the 1977 season, his 13th in the NFL. Though his receiving numbers might look paltry in today’s pass-happy NFL, Warfield’s 20.1 yards-per-catch average ranks among the best in league history. And Brandt believes he would have done even more in Dallas.
“He had unbelievable quickness, unbelievable speed. He had hands that were great,” Brandt said. “He would’ve caught 75 passes for us a year if we would’ve gotten him.”
Warfield, a first-ballot Hall of Fame inductee in 1983, spent six years as an adviser in the Browns’ front office before stepping down in 2010. The 78-year-old Warfield now lives in Rancho Mirage, Calif., where he golfs and marvels at the modern NFL offenses.
“The style of play is much, much different,” he said. “Much more passing.”
Asked about his football legacy, Warfield mentioned how “very fortunate” he was to have played in the NFL with two successful organizations. According to Griese, that humility was present from the moment Warfield showed up in Miami.
“He was a team guy from the get-go,” Griese said. “He was a very intelligent guy. He was always a positive guy in the locker room. You know, you run into some of these guys that are not that way. They want the ball all the time and they say, ‘Why didn’t you throw it to me that time?’ or ‘I was open this time.’ Paul never did that. He was a good guy from the get-go.”
(Top illustration: Wes McCabe / The Athletic; photo: Tony Tomsic / Associated Press)
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