Dub Jones, an All-Pro running back and flanker for Cleveland Browns championship teams of the late 1940s and ’50s and one of four N.F.L. players to score six touchdowns in a single game, died on Saturday at his home in Ruston, La. He was 99.
His son Bert, a former N.F.L. quarterback, confirmed the death.
Playing in an innovative offensive scheme devised by Paul Brown, the founder and coach of the Browns, Jones was a double threat. He was an outstanding runner at right halfback and caught passes out of the backfield as a flanker, a position introduced by Brown to spread the field for passes uncorked by the future Hall of Fame quarterback Otto Graham.
On Nov. 25, 1951, Jones scored four touchdowns running from scrimmage and two on passes from Graham in the Browns’ 42-21 rout of the Chicago Bears at the cavernous old Cleveland Stadium, tying the six-touchdown record set by the Chicago Cardinals’ Ernie Nevers in a 1929 game. Only Gale Sayers, with the 1965 Bears, and Alvin Kamara, with the 2020 New Orleans Saints, have matched them.
Brown used rotating guards as “messengers” to bring in plays, although he allowed quarterbacks to call an “audible,” changing his play if they saw a vulnerable defensive alignment. Late in the Browns’ 1951 romp of the Bears, Brown stuck with that procedure.
“With Cleveland safely ahead, I sent in a running play,” he recalled in an autobiography, “PB: The Paul Brown Story” (1979, with Jack Clary). “Otto knew that Dub Jones had already scored five touchdowns and needed only one more to set a record, so he discarded the call and selected a pass. Dub scored on the play, and I said nothing about it because the play had been successful.”
Jones ran for 116 yards on nine carries and caught three passes for 80 yards in that game, including Graham’s climactic 43-yard touchdown toss.
“It was one of the few times I ever disobeyed a Paul Brown call, but I was really glad it happened to a guy like Dub Jones,” Graham said in an interview years later. “He was truly a team man who didn’t give a darn about records as long as we won.”
William Augustus Jones was born on Dec. 29, 1924, in Arcadia, in north Louisiana, the youngest of four brothers. His nickname derived from the approximate sounding of the letter W in his first name.
His father died when Dub was 3, and his mother moved the family to nearby Ruston, where he played for a state championship high school football team. He played for Louisiana State University in 1942 and Tulane in 1943 and ’44, enrolling in a campus Navy program, which trained prospective officers for World War II duty. He played for a Navy football team in New London, Conn., in 1945.
Jones played for the Miami Seahawks and the Brooklyn Dodgers of the All-America Football Conference, which was founded in 1946, and then joined the Cleveland Browns, a member team of that league, in 1948. When the A.A.F.C. disbanded before the 1950 season, the N.F.L. admitted the Browns and two other teams from that league. The Browns had won all four A.A.F.C. championships.
Jones’s Browns teams won N.F.L. championships in 1950, 1954 and 1955. He was named to the Pro Bowl, the league’s All-Star game, and was selected by sportswriters as a first team All-Pro in 1951. He went to the Pro Bowl again in 1952.
At 6 feet 4 inches and 200 pounds or so — a tall target for his era — Jones often went into motion as a flanker before the ball was snapped, complementing the Browns’ star ends, Dante Lavelli and Mac Speedie, who lined up at opposite sides of the offensive line, giving Graham three receiving targets. The Browns also featured the powerful fullback Marion Motley.
Jones credited Graham for much of the Browns’ success. “We always felt Otto could and would make the big play before the game was over,” he told the podcast “The Game Before the Money” in 2020.
Jones retired as a player after the 1955 season, having run for 2,210 yards, amassed 2,874 yards in pass receptions and scored a total of 41 touchdowns in his 10 pro seasons.
He returned to the Browns as an offensive coach from 1963 to 1968 under Blanton Collier, the successor to Paul Brown, and oversaw the future Hall of Famers Jim Brown, Leroy Kelly and Paul Warfield. The Browns defeated the Baltimore Colts, 27-0, to win the 1964 N.F.L. championship.
Jones occasionally scouted for Grambling State University of Louisiana and worked in his family’s general contracting business in Ruston. His son Bert Jones was an outstanding N.F.L. quarterback, playing with the Baltimore Colts from 1973 to 1981 and with the Los Angeles Rams in 1982. He was voted the league’s most valuable player in 1976.
In addition to his son Bert, Jones is survived by his wife, Schumpert (Barnes) Jones; four other sons, Bill, Schump, Ben and Tom; two daughters, Hasson Glasgow and Nancy Knox; 22 grandchildren; and 38 great-grandchildren.
Apart from his six-touchdown game, Jones especially remembered the first game his Browns played in the N.F.L., a September 1950 matchup with the Philadelphia Eagles, who had won the two previous league championships. The Browns came away with a stunning 35-10 victory en route to the N.F.L. championship.
Jones likened that game to the Super Bowls of the future. As he put it in his podcast interview, “It was the biggest game I ever played in.”
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