Otto Graham

After the outbreak of World War II Graham joined the Navy, marrying Beverly Collinge after his training was completed. Transferred to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Graham worked briefly with Paul "Bear" Bryant, who later won fame as the coach of the University of Alabama's "Crimson Tide." After the conclusion of the war, Graham began playing pro basketball with the Rochester Royals of the NBL. The team, whose roster included Red Holtzman, Chuck Connors, and Del Rice, went on to win the NBL championship in 1946.

Although Graham had been drafted in the first round by the NFL's Detroit Lions, he accepted a $7,500 contract and a $1,000 bonus to play with the Cleveland Browns, a team being organizing for the upstart All America Football Conference (AAFC) by Brown—whose powerful Ohio State team Graham had helped defeat as a college player. Graham later told Fred Goodall of the Associated Press "I wasn't that smart, but I made the best move of my life to go there and work with Paul. I didn't always love him, but he ran the show and taught us the basics of everything." Brown thought just as highly of Graham. "Otto was my greatest player," Brown is quoted in Encyclopedia of World Biography Supplement. "He had the finest peripheral vision I had ever seen, and that is a big factor in a quarterback. He was a tremendous playmaker. He had unusual eye-and-hand coordination, and he was bigger and faster than you thought."

"Automatic Otto"'s powerful and accurate arm, his coolness under pressure and his ability to execute Paul Brown's playbook transformed pro football from a running game to the passing game of the contemporary sport. "I could throw hard if I had to, I could lay it up soft, I could drill the sideline pass. God-given ability. The rest was practice, practice, practice," Graham told Paul Zimmerman of Sports Illustrated in 1998. "I had the luxury of having the same receivers for almost my entire career. We developed the timed sideline attack, the comeback route where the receiver goes to the sideline, stops and comes back to the ball, with everything thrown on rhythm." Graham became one of the leading passers of the late 1940s and early 1950s. He led the NFL in passing twice, and in 1952 passed for 401 yards in a single victory against Pittsburgh, completing twenty-one of forty-nine.