There’s a reason the Pro Football Hall of Fame resides in Ohio.

It is not there because somebody in Canton happened to have a good real-estate pitch. It is there because professional football, as we know it, has roots buried deep in Ohio soil.

The American Professional Football Association — the organization that would become the NFL — was founded in Canton in 1920. The Canton Bulldogs were among the sport’s first great professional teams, winning championships in 1922 and 1923, and Jim Thorpe brought star power to professional football when the idea of being paid to play the game was still fighting for legitimacy.

More than a century later, Canton remains football’s spiritual home. But Ohio’s influence on the sport stretches far beyond one city.

At the professional level, Cleveland and Cincinnati have produced generations of football history. At the college level, Ohio State has become one of the defining programs in the sport, while Cincinnati has played football on the same patch of ground in Clifton since 1901. At the high school level, communities such as Massillon and Canton have treated Friday nights less like sporting events and more like civic ceremonies for generations.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that stands Paul Brown. It is difficult to tell the story of modern football without eventually telling the story of an Ohioan from Massillon.

Brown built a high school dynasty at Massillon Washington, coached Ohio State to its first national championship in 1942 and later founded and coached the Cleveland Browns. After his bitter split with Art Modell, Brown eventually went down the road and founded the Cincinnati Bengals.

Even the visual identities of the teams Brown built carried pieces of his Massillon roots. The Tigers wore orange and black. Cleveland retained that familiar orange while pairing it with brown and white. When Brown founded the Bengals, he returned to the orange-and-black combination of his high school days and even chose another tiger name — Bengals instead of Tigers.

In that sense, the football lineage from Massillon to Cleveland to Cincinnati is impossible to miss.

And simply starting football teams barely scratches the surface of Paul Brown’s influence.

Brown helped turn coaching into a year-round profession. He embraced film study and classroom instruction. He called plays from the sideline when that was not yet standard practice. His teams helped popularize concepts such as the passing pocket and draw play. He pushed advances in equipment, scouting and player evaluation that seem completely ordinary today only because football eventually copied him.

His Cleveland Browns also helped reintegrate professional football in 1946 with Bill Willis and Marion Motley, both of whom became Hall of Famers. Paul Brown did not merely coach football. He helped design the version of football we still watch.

That lineage continued through people who learned under him. Coaches including Bill Walsh and Don Shula passed through Brown’s football orbit before leaving their own marks on the sport. Players such as Otto Graham, Lou Groza, Marion Motley and Jim Brown helped make Cleveland one of professional football’s signature franchises.

Jim Brown in particular remains impossible to discuss without understanding how far ahead of his era he was. He led the NFL in rushing eight times in nine seasons and retired while still operating at a level that made him look like he had been dropped into the wrong decade.

Think Jeremiah Smith dropped into the ’60s.

Ohio’s college football history is no less imposing. Ohio State has won national championships under multiple generations of coaches and produced Heisman Trophy winners, Hall of Famers and countless NFL players. Woody Hayes built the Buckeyes into a national institution, and Archie Griffin accomplished something nobody before or since has matched by winning the Heisman Trophy twice.

Ohio’s influence on coaching deserves its own chapter. Miami University in Oxford is known as the “Cradle of Coaches” for a reason. Woody Hayes, Bo Schembechler, Ara Parseghian, Weeb Ewbank, Paul Brown and Sid Gillman all had ties to Miami, and the tradition continued through later generations. At one point in 1977, five of the Big Ten’s 10 head coaches were Miami products. The school did not simply produce good coaches. For decades, it functioned almost like a graduate school for people who would go on to shape college and professional football.

And Miami is hardly alone among Ohio’s smaller schools in leaving an oversized mark on the sport. Oberlin hired Cleveland native John Heisman as its first professional football coach in 1892, and he led the Yeomen to a perfect 7-0 season. Nearly three decades later, Oberlin defeated Ohio State 7-6 in 1921 and remains the last in-state school to beat the Buckeyes.

Then there is Mount Union, which may have the most absurd résumé of any Division III program in the country. The Purple Raiders have won 13 national championships and built one of the great dynasties in small-college football history. Larry Kehres alone won 11 national titles, turning Alliance into one of the sport’s most unlikely championship capitals.

Youngstown State belongs in that conversation as well. Under Jim Tressel, the Penguins won four Division I-AA national championships in 1991, 1993, 1994 and 1997, while reaching the title game two additional times. Tressel would eventually take that championship pedigree to Ohio State, but the foundation of his reputation was built in Youngstown.

And then there are the stadiums.

Ohio Stadium, known as The Horseshoe opened in 1922, when constructing a stadium capable of holding more than 60,000 people seemed excessive enough to invite criticism. A century later, it holds more than 100,000 and remains one of the most recognizable venues in American sports.

Its existence says something about how Ohio viewed football even then. Long before college football became a multibillion-dollar television product, Ohioans were already building monuments to it.

Cincinnati has one of its own.

The Bearcats have played at the site of Nippert Stadium since 1901, making it the second-oldest continuously used college football playing site in the country. Permanent stadium construction began in 1915, and the structure was eventually completed after the death of Cincinnati player Jimmy Nippert, who suffered a wound during the 1923 game against Miami and died from blood poisoning weeks later. His grandfather, James Gamble of Procter & Gamble, provided the money needed to finish the stadium.

Nippert was dedicated in 1924. Today it sits in the middle of campus, surrounded by buildings and walkways in a way that makes it feel less like a stadium somebody constructed and more like something the university grew around.

That may be the best way to describe football in Ohio generally. It is not something the state adopted. It grew here.

The Browns and Bengals carry that history on Sundays. Ohio State and Cincinnati do it on Saturdays. Hundreds of high schools take over towns and neighborhoods every Friday night. Canton preserves the history of the professional game, while stadiums in Columbus and Cincinnati physically connect the sport’s past to its present.

There are plenty of states with great football and plenty with great teams. Ohio is different because it helped build the sport itself. The Pro Football Hall of Fame could stand anywhere in America, but it stands in Canton.

Exactly where it belongs.