Late Sunday night, when a good number of you, especially those who have to get up early for work and school, have turned in for the evening, the NFL will award the Lombardi Trophy to the winner of Super Bowl 58 between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers.
What a joke that will be.
The issue is not at all that the league champion will receive the prestigious trophy. That’s really cool! What an honor! It is as it should be.
Rather, it’s that the award is named for Vince Lombardi.
Now, don’t get me wrong, Lombardi is one of the greatest head coaches the NFL has ever seen. History tells us so. But, other than being the coach of the winning Green Bay Packers team in the first two Super Bowls, he did nothing to merit having the trophy named in his honor. What he brought to the sport was a maximizing of something that had been around even before they were wearing not leather helmets but no helmets, and that was discipline, accountability, attention to detail and a commitment to excellence.
But pro football has always been a sport that deeply values and cherishes its history — How did we get here, and who was responsible for it? — and in that regard, then, the man for whom the game’s top award should be named is Paul Brown.
Indeed, he has for decades, and will continue, to stand the test of time.
Brown, the founding head coach of both the Browns and Cincinnati Bengals, is called “The Father of Modern Football” for a reason — actually, a lot of reasons. His innovations have brought pro football to where it is today. Nearly everything in the game traces at least in some way to the coach who built the Massillon Tigers into a national high school power, guided Ohio State to its first national championship, took the Browns to a league championship game in each of their first 10 years of existence, with seven titles, and got the Bengals to a division title im just their third year.
The modern passing game, with its spread formation and sophisticated principles? That’s Paul Brown.
Full-time assistant coaches? That’s Paul Brown.
Film study? That’s Paul Brown.
Playbooks? That’s Paul Brown.
Radios in helmets for communication between coaches and players on the field? That’s Paul Brown.
On and on and on it goes. To be sure, this, that or the other – whatever it is – traces back to the man with the fedora who was born in Norwalk.
And with that, then, it’s such a huge disgrace and egregious show of disrespect that the league has never acknowledged him in a way that suits his prominence.
The Lombardi trophy? Are you kidding me?
I guess the most ironic thing of it all is that Lombardi and Brown were close friends dating back to the 1950s when Lombardi was an assistant coach with the Browns‘ arch trials, the New York Giants.
Whatever the case, they can call that trophy whatever they want. But to me, it will always be the Paul Brown Trophy, because it represents a game that he would recognize if he could come back and see it. I’m not sure I could say the same for Vince Lombardi.
Steve King
