sign as many good players as possible to compete with the NFL. However, this open market favored Paul Brown, who had built the most extensive recruitment network in all of football. He thus had a head start in signing top players coming out of the colleges and military. Years later, Crowley acknowledged this was a fatal mistake, as it planted the seeds for the Browns' near-total dominance of the league. Initial alignment For 1946, the AAFC began play with 8 teams playing a record 14 games (a double round-robin). The NFL's 10 teams played 11 games, its standard since 1937. Again acting ambitiously, the AAFC chose stadiums larger than the NFL's in Chicago, New York, and Cleveland. The two leagues’ franchises and home fields for 1946 were: NFL AAFC 1946 In the AAFC's first game, on September 6, 1946, the Cleveland Browns hosted the Miami Seahawks, winning 44–0 before a professional football record crowd of more than 60,000 fans. This historic game would prove a microcosm of much about the league: Largely thanks to Paul Brown's innovations in organization and coaching, the Browns were on their way to setting a new standard of pro football excellence. The other teams would have significant problems, but the Seahawks would become the AAFC's biggest fiasco. Along with two of their home games being postponed by hurricanes, they attracted poor home crowds en route to finishing last with a 3–11 record. These factors resulted in the Seahawks losing $350,000 for the year, and the AAFC shutting down the franchise after the season. The crowd was the first of many large gates that the AAFC's most popular teams (Cleveland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York) would attract, surpassing the NFL. The score, however, was the first sign of the AAFC's greatest problem. The league would have a wide gap between its best and worst teams, and its standings would be remarkably consistent from year to year. Finally, this game marked the end of pro football's color line. The Browns' Marion Motley and Bill Willis, both future Hall of Famers, became the first black players to play pro football since 1933 (the NFL Rams, who had also signed two black players, UCLA great Kenny Washington and future actor Woody Strode, opened several weeks later). Notably, this was before Jackie Robinson's debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, as Robinson was then playing for the Montreal Royals, the