Brunswick-Balke-Collender Cup

• 1. Introduction

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  The Brunswick-Balke-Collender Cup was once the highest prize in American professional football, a silver loving cup awarded to the champion of the newly formed American Professional Football Association. It was presented exactly once. Then it vanished.

  At the founding meeting of what would become the NFL, held on the 17th of September 1920, a man referred to only as "Mr. Marshall" donated the trophy on behalf of the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company's Tire Division. The minutes recorded the agreement: the cup would go to whatever team the Association judged champion. Any team that won it three times could keep it outright.

  No team ever won it twice. The Akron Pros received it on the 30th of April 1921 and, somewhere between that hotel meeting and the present day, the cup disappeared entirely. What followed was decades of confusion, a disputed championship, a missing successor trophy, and a replacement that itself went missing before the league finally settled on a new one each year.

• 2. The Meeting at the Portage Hotel

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  Akron Pros owners Art Ranney and Frank Nied accepted the 1920 APFA Championship trophy from former Penn State star Timmy Bryant at an association meeting held at the Portage Hotel. The Pros had posted an 8-0-3 record that season, an unbeaten run that seemed to make them the obvious choice.

  But the choice was not obvious to everyone. The Buffalo All-Americans and the Decatur Staleys, later renamed the Chicago Bears in 1922, both objected. They had been tied by the Pros but never beaten by them, and they felt that distinction mattered.

  A separate complication sat at the head of the room. President Jim Thorpe and Vice President Stan Cofall were both absent from the meeting, leaving Ranney himself to preside over the vote. Ranney, of course, co-owned the team that stood to be crowned champion. The conflict of interest was plain, and critics of the decision pointed to it directly.

  The wording in the original meeting minutes had established that the championship would be determined by a vote of league managers rather than standings, which meant the whole question was already a matter of judgment rather than arithmetic. That ambiguity gave the losing teams ground to stand on when they pushed back.

• 3. Lost Records, Disputed Glory

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  Neither the All-Americans nor the Staleys followed up formally on the trophy's whereabouts the following year. The All-Americans, rather than waiting on the dispute's resolution, commissioned their own trophies before the ruling came in: small gold footballs. When the decision ultimately went to the Staleys, those gold footballs were a quiet footnote to the whole affair.

  The NFL itself compounded the confusion. Despite awarding the cup to the Pros in 1921, the league subsequently lost track of its own action. For a long stretch of years, the league's official record books listed the 1920 championship as undecided. The cup had been handed over; the paperwork had not been kept straight.

  It took until the 1970s for the NFL to recover its early documentary evidence and formally acknowledge that the Akron Pros had won the 1920 championship. Decades had passed during which the league's founding-season title was, as far as the record books showed, simply blank.

  The cup itself was never located. After the 30th of April 1921, the APFA and NFL meeting minutes never mentioned it again. The only confirmed visual record of the object is a photograph that appeared in two newspapers from the era.

• 4. A Successor, Then Another Mystery

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  Thirteen years after the original cup was awarded, the league finally commissioned a replacement. Starting with the 1934 Championship game, the winning team received the Ed Thorp Memorial Trophy, named for Ed Thorp, a referee, rules expert, and sporting goods dealer who died that same year.

  The Thorp trophy worked much as the original had: a single large traveling trophy passed from champion to champion each season, with each winner's name inscribed on it. Teams also received a replica with only their own name engraved, not the full history.

  For decades, the original Ed Thorp Trophy was believed to have last been awarded to the Minnesota Vikings for their 1969 championship. After that, it went missing. Evidence released in 2020 cast doubt on whether the Vikings or the Baltimore Colts, who had won the NFL title in 1968, ever actually held the original trophy. The Vikings did receive a trophy for 1969, but surviving documents suggest it may have been a different object altogether.

  The original Ed Thorp Trophy was eventually found in the possession of the Green Bay Packers Hall of Fame. The names inscribed on it run only through the 1967 Packers, who won Super Bowl II.

• 5. The Trophy That Replaced Them Both

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  Since 1970, the NFL has awarded the Vince Lombardi Trophy to its championship team each year. Unlike the two cups before it, the Lombardi Trophy is not a traveling object passed from team to team. A brand-new trophy is produced every year.

  The Lombardi Trophy itself dates to 1967 and the first Super Bowl. When the NFL and the American Football League merged, the league retained it as the symbol of the championship. That continuity distinguishes it from its predecessors, both of which vanished after years of circulation.

  The Brunswick-Balke-Collender Cup, by contrast, remains described in the historical record only as "a silver loving cup." No full photograph, no dimensions, no maker's mark has surfaced in the years since. The founding meeting's rule that any team winning it three times would become its rightful owner was never tested, because no team ever won it at all after 1920.