Frank Ryan, the last quarterback to win an NFL title with the Cleveland Browns, died Monday in a Connecticut nursing home after a battle with Alzheimer’s disease, according to his son, Frank “Pancho” Ryan Jr. He was 87. Ryan threw three touchdown passes in a 27-0 upset victory over the Baltimore Colts in 1964. The Browns have not won a championship since and have never made it to the Super Bowl, which began in 1966. While playing football, Ryan studied for a Ph.D. at Rice University in math and served as an associate professor at Case Western Reserve University from 1967 to 1971. He attracted media attention for his diverse interests but told The Saturday Evening Post in 1965 that “an analytical mind can certainly help a quarterback, but people who say that a mathematical mind is important are just not very well-informed about mathematics. What I do at the university has nothing at all to do with what I do on the field.” Ryan retired from the NFL in 1970 and later worked as the first director of development for a computer voting system in the U.S. Congress. Cleveland.com reported that Ryan donated his brain to Boston University’s Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center, which studies how head trauma like concussions can lead to the death of nerve cells in the brain.
