Bill Belichick is no longer in the NFL (at least for a year, anyway), but that doesn’t mean he’s short on suggestions for the league.
During his weekly appearance on the Let’s Go podcast, Belichick stressed how essential it is to have great players, regardless of how good the coach is.
“You gotta have good players, and as a coach, you want to give your players a chance to win,” Belichick said. “You wanna put ’em in a position where if they go out there and play well, they’ll have a chance to win. That’s what coach [Bill] Parcells taught me, is there’s always a way to win. You just gotta figure out what it is, and you have to give the players a chance.”
To Belichick’s point, host Jim Gray noted that the NFL’s championship trophy is called the Lombardi Trophy, after Packers head coach Vince Lombardi, not the Starr Trophy, after Green Bay’s quarterback during the early part of the Super Bowl era. Belichick followed Gray’s point by adding, “Maybe they should name it the Brady Trophy. He won seven of them.”
The chances of the NFL renaming the Lombardi Trophy after Brady – or anyone else -are extremely small. Nor should there be any renaming of the trophy. Despite the popular media talking point that the Chiefs are on the verge of the first three-peat, Vince Lombardi actually three-peated with the Packers by winning the last NFL Championship and the first two Super Bowls.
In addition, Lombardi won five NFL titles in seven years, a feat neither the Chiefs nor Tom Brady and his Patriots ever accomplished. And, who knows how many Super Bowls Lombardi would have won in Washington had he coached more than one year with Sonny Jurgenson? Jurgenson was the best quarterback Lombardi ever had. But, he only had one season with him due to the coach’s death from cancer in 1970.
It’s not unreasonable to believe that Lombardi and the redhead kid from North Carolina would have added at least one Super Bowl to the coach’s already impressive championship resume.
So, no, the Lombardi Trophy is a perfectly appropriate name for the NFL’s ultimate prize, and it should stick.
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