Ed Thorpe was an early football referee, rules expert and a friend to some of the early NFL owners. When he died in 1934, the owners decided to create a trophy to honor him. In today's NFL, when a team wins the Lombardi Trophy, they get a brand new trophy. There was only one Ed Thorp trophy and it was passed on from champion to champion much like the NHL's Stanley Cup.
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| A news clipping from the June 23rd edition of the Berkeley Daily Gazette announcing that Thorp had passed away. |
The Ed Thorp Memorial trophy was the NFL's championship trophy from 1934-1969.
In 1966, the NFL agreed to merge with the AFL to create one National Football League. However, the league decided to continue to award the to the winner of the NFL Conference. The last team that won the award was the Minnesota Vikings.
The Vikings only won a single Ed Thorp trophy in the franchise history. After all, Minnesota had only been in the league for eight years, but had the building blocks in place to be one of the great franchises of the 1970s. Hall of Fame head coach Bud Grant was now in his third season as head coach and had taken the Vikings from a 3-8 team to 12-2 and the top of the NFL. With Pro Bowl quarterback Joe Kapp at the helm, future Hall of Famers Ron Yary and Mick Tingelhoff protecting him, and Alan Page, Carl Eller, Gary Larson and Jim Marshall on the defensive line, Minnesota was poised to win multiple championships.
They defeated the Baltimore Colts, who had knocked them out of the 1968 NFL Playoffs, by 38 points en route to a 12 game winning streak in 1969. In fact, they led the league in both PPG (27.1) and PA (9.1). The Vikings literally dominated every aspect of the game. On January 4th, 1970, they shellacked the Cleveland Browns in the NFL Championship game at a freezing Metropolitan Stadium 27-7 to advance to their first Super Bowl. The team was awarded the final Ed Thorp Memorial Trophy as the 1969 NFL Champions.
And they lost it.
Straight up lost it. The trophy just disappeared.
Fans didn't know it at the time, but losing the Ed Thorp trophy would kick off a decades-long curse for the Minnesota Vikings. They entered Super Bowl IV as 12 point favorites against Len Dawson and the Kansas City Chiefs.
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| Yeah, about that... |
The Vikings lost 23-7.
But that's not all folks. Despite re-acquiring Hall of Fame quarterback Fran Tarkenton from the New York Giants in 1972 and featuring the daunting Purple People Eater defense, the Vikings would lose three Super Bowls in four years from 1974 to 1977. The year they didn't make the Super Bowl was the famed "Hail Mary" play from Roger Staubach to Drew Pearson that knocked the Vikings out of the playoffs in 1975.
And it doesn't end there. From the Herschel Walker trade in 1989 to Gary Anderson in 1998 to the Brett Favre interception in 2010 to Blair Walsh in 2016, the Vikings have seen promising seasons end in tears and frustration. In fact, the Vikings have the most playoff losses (28) in league history.
The kicker with the Ed Thorp Memorial Trophy is that, to this day, nobody knows where that trophy is.
It was discovered in 2015, however, that there the original traveling trophy was only awarded from 1934 to 1939, when the Green Bay Packers stashed it, and a new trophy was awarded to the rival Chicago Bears in 1940. What's even more intriguing is that somebody continued to etch the names of the winners of the trophy on the original until 1951, when it ran out of room.
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