Frank Ryan: A Legacy of Excellence in Football and Mathematics (1936–2024)

Football player, college administrator, and mathematics professor, Frank Ryan, as he was better-known, was born Francis Beall Ryan on July 12, 1936, in Fort Worth, Texas. He was the second son of Frances (Beall) Ryan and Robert Willing Ryan, Sr. He was named after his grandfather Frank Beall, a noted Fort Worth surgeon. Raised in Fort Worth, Ryan displayed talent both in the classroom and on the gridiron at R. L. Paschal High School. As a student, he showed an interest in physics and engineering. For a high school quarterback, he stood six feet, three inches tall and weighted around 175 pounds during his senior year in 1954. Although he possessed a strong arm, Ryan was not viewed as an accurate passer, and as a result, few colleges offered him a scholarship. Texas A&M head football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, however, tried to bring Ryan to College Station. Ryan’s parents had hopes that Frank might attend Yale because three generations of the family, including their oldest son Robert Jr., had studied at the Ivy League school. Because of his interest in mathematics and physics, Frank Ryan accepted the offer to attend the Rice Institute (now Rice University) because of its academic reputation and the challenge to play college football in the Southwest Conference.

As in high school, Frank Ryan provided an example of a true student–athlete when he arrived on the campus of Rice. Majoring in physics, Ryan worked hard to prove he could achieve in academics and in football. At Rice in the 1940s and 1950s future College Hall of Fame coach Jess Neely had established a strong football program that competed against powerhouses in the Southwest Conference.  Ryan injured his knee as a sophomore, and this hindered his playing time. In his final two seasons, he served as a backup quarterback to King Hill. In his senior season in 1957 Rice won the Southwest Conference title, finished with an overall 7–4 record, and was ranked eighth in the final Associated Press poll. Although Navy defeated the Owls 20–7 in the Cotton Bowl on January 1, 1958, Ryan came off the bench to throw a touchdown pass.

With the end of the football season, Ryan took care of other pressing matters. On March 1, 1958, he married fellow Rice student Joan Marie Busby at St. John the Divine Episcopal Church in Houston. They remained married for sixty-five years and raised four sons. Ryan also applied to graduate school and was accepted at both UCLA and the University of California at Berkeley. At the end of the academic term, he received his bachelor’s degree in physics from Rice Institute.

 A few weeks after receiving his degree, Ryan was taken in the fifth round (fifty-fifth overall) by the Los Angeles Rams in the National Football League’s (NFL) annual draft. The Chicago Cardinals drafted King Hill as the number one pick in the draft. Ryan was shocked that he was drafted but decided to give professional football a try while continuing his studies in the offseason at UCLA.    Although he started a number of games, Ryan spent his four years with the Rams as a backup. On October 1, 1961, he threw two touchdowns, including a ninety-six-yard touchdown pass to Ollie Matson, in a game against the Pittsburgh Steelers which proved to be the high point in his Rams tenure. In 1962 the Rams traded Ryan to the Cleveland Browns.

Frank Ryan experienced much success as the quarterback for the Cleveland Browns. In his seven seasons with the Browns, he led the team to the playoffs four times. Midway in the 1962 season, Coach Paul Brown inserted Ryan into the lineup after starting quarterback Jim Ninowski was injured. With the future Pro Football Hall of Fame running back Jim Brown, the team proved to be a major contender for the NFL championship. Ryan also showed he was capable of throwing the long ball and being one of the league’s most accurate passers. In the NFL championship game on December 27, 1964, Ryan threw for a total of 206 yards, including three second-half touchdown passes to receiver Gary Collins, as the seventeen-point underdog Cleveland Browns pulled a stunning upset over the favored Baltimore Colts, led by future Hall of Fame quarterback Johnny Unitas, 27–0.  As a Brown, Ryan was named to the Pro Bowl in 1964, 1965, and 1966 and led the NFL in touchdown passes in 1964 (with 25) and 1966 (with 29). Hampered by injuries, Ryan was released by the Browns after the 1968 season. He saw little playing time in his final two seasons with the Washington Redskins as Sonny Jurgensen’s backup. However, using his mathematics acumen, Ryan did convince Coach Vince Lombardi about the advantages of compiling advanced statistics on the game. Ryan’s professional football career consisted of thirteen seasons. He passed for a total of 16,042 yards and threw 149 touchdowns.

Before his retirement from the NFL in 1970, Ryan had already begun his academic career. From the start of his tenure with the Los Angeles Rams in 1958, he attended graduate school first at UCLA and then at Rice University where he enrolled as a student every spring term for the next seven years.  In 1962 Ryan earned his master’s degree in mathematics. Dr. Gerald R. MacLane served as his dissertation director and mentor for his graduate studies. He completed his dissertation, “A Characterization of the Set of Asymptotic Values of a Function Holomorphic in the Unit Disc,” and was awarded his Ph.D. in mathematics at Rice in June 1965—six months after the Browns won the NFL championship. While still with the Browns, Ryan accepted a position as assistant professor of mathematics at Case Institute of Technology (now Case Western Reserve University) in Cleveland in February 1967. At Case, Ryan taught a variety of advanced mathematics courses for both undergraduate and graduate students. He was promoted to associate professor in 1971 and resigned his position in 1974.

Moving away from football, Frank Ryan found new opportunities for his other talents beginning in the early 1970s. In addition to his duties at Case, Ryan was appointed to the post of director of House information systems for the United States House of Representatives in Washington, D. C. In this post, he developed the first computerized voting system for Congress. In 1978 Ryan accepted the position as athletic director at Yale University in which he also taught mathematics. In the late 1980s he served as the CEO of Contex Electronics, a company that produced low tech electrical devices in Fort Worth. Ryan returned to Rice University after he was named the vice president for external affairs and as a professor of computational and applied mathematics in 1990. Due to differences with President Malcolm Gillis, Ryan stepped down from his post with external affairs in February 1995. He remained on the faculty as a professor until he retired in 1998. 

Frank Ryan and his wife Joan, who was a sportswriter and also a nationally-syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, spent their retirement years in Grafton, Vermont. In addition to working with advanced mathematics, Ryan enjoyed golfing, reading, and traveling. On January 1, 2024, Ryan died at the age of eighty-seven from complications of Alzheimer’s decease at a nursing home in Waterford, Connecticut. At the time of his death, he was survived by his wife Joan and four sons. He was buried in Sportsmans Road Cemetery in Stamford, Vermont. The Ryan family issued a statement in which they suspected that Frank Ryan might have suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a brain disorder caused by head injuries related to his football career. Before his death, Ryan arranged to donate his brain to the Boston University CTE Center. 

Frank Beall Ryan experienced success in both his athletic and academic career. From his hometown, he was inducted into the Fort Worth Independent School District Wall of Fame. Rice University indicted him into their Athletic Hall of Fame in 1973, and he was named as a Distinguished Alumnus for his contributions in mathematics and education. The Cleveland Browns named Ryan a Browns Legend in their class of 2005.