A three-time Pro Bowl selection with Cleveland, Ryan led the Browns to their most recent National Football League title in 1964.

Ryan did come in for a faltering Hill in the 1958 Cotton Bowl on new year's day to throw a touchdown pass, though eventually losing to Navy.

[7] Given his desire to obtain a Ph.D., Ryan originally decided not to play professional football after the Los Angeles Rams chose him in the fifth round of the 1958 NFL draft.

However, after sitting on the bench for the last four games of the 1961 season, Ryan stormed into the dressing room and threatened General Manager Elroy "Crazylegs" Hirsch that he was going to quit football if he were not traded.

He became part of a multi-player deal with the Cleveland Browns on July 12, 1962,[7] his 26th birthday, as the arrival of highly touted newcomer Roman Gabriel, whom the Rams selected with the second overall pick in the 1962 draft,[9] made Ryan expendable.

[1] Ryan had excellent company on the Browns offense: fullback Jim Brown; wide receivers Gary Collins and hall of famer Paul Warfield; and an outstanding offensive line which included Dick Schafrath, John Morrow, John Wooten, Monte Clark, and future Hall of Famer Gene Hickerson.

Part of Ryan's decline can also be traced to the absence of second-year wide receiver Paul Warfield, who missed much of the season after suffering a double fracture of the collarbone in the team's first exhibition game.

[17] In 1966, he bounced back with a superb season, leading the league with 29 touchdown passes[1] and finishing second with 2,976 yards[18] despite playing with intense pain.

Ryan's output helped alleviate the absence of the legendary Jim Brown, who had retired prior to the start of training camp.

Browns' head coach Blanton Collier replaced Ryan with Bill Nelsen, who went on to lead the team to a division title.

[3] Despite throwing only one pass during the 1969 season, Ryan returned for the last of his 13 years in the NFL in 1970, playing for coach Bill Austin after Lombardi's death from cancer in September 1970,[1] before officially announcing his retirement on April 13, 1971.

[20] He worked for seven postgraduate years under G. R. MacLane, a leading geometric-function theorist, and produced the dissertation "Characterization of the Set of Asymptotic Values of a Function Holomorphic in the Unit Disc".

[8] In 1966, Ryan published two fundamental papers on the set of asymptotic values of a function holomorphic in the unit disc in Duke Mathematical Journal.

[22] Ryan started teaching at Rice during his career and, during his time with the Browns, he became an assistant professor at the Case Institute of Technology in February 1967.

Ryan had a full teaching load,[23] which includes undergraduate and graduate courses, and conducting research in complex analysis.

Red Smith wrote that the Browns' offense consisted of a quarterback who understood Einstein's theory of relativity and ten teammates who didn't know there was one.

Ryan considered Sir Edward Collingwood, an expert in meromorphic function and the theory of cluster sets, and Arthur J. Lohwater, the former editor of Mathematical Reviews, as mentors.

[28] Soon after his retirement from the Redskins, Ryan remained in the nation's capital when he was named director of information services for the U.S. House of Representatives.

While there, he helped advance the computer age in politics by playing an integral role in establishing the body's first electronic voting system.

During the late 1970s a Yale employee informed Ryan that many thousands of nude photographs of young men in front, side and rear poses with metal pins sticking out from their spines had been discovered in a room in Payne Whitney Gymnasium.

[3][6] Ryan was president and chief executive officer of Contex Electronics, which designed and manufactured cable and interconnect products for the computer and communications industries.

[8] Ryan lived on 78 acres of heavily forested land[33] in Grafton, Vermont, with his wife, Joan, a retired sportswriter and nationally syndicated columnist for The Washington Post.