Super Bowl trophy: What is it and why is it named after Vince Lombardi?

At the end of each Super Bowl, the winning team gets to hoist the Lombardi Trophy, which is named after former Green Bay Packers head coach Vince Lombardi.

Lombardi was the first coach to win a Super Bowl in January 1967. However, during that time, the championship game was referred to as the AFL-NFL World Championship Game.

The league changed the name to the Super Bowl in 1969, but Lombardi went down in the history books as the first coach to win a Super Bowl after the merger.

But that is not the reason why the NFL named the prestigious trophy after him. In 1970, the 57-year-old lost his battle with cancer, so the league decided to honor Lombardi’s memory by naming the Super Bowl trophy after him.

Before the trophy was named after Lombardi, it was simply called the World Professional Football Championship Trophy. The first team to hoist the newly-named Lombardi Trophy was the Baltimore Colts, who defeated the Dallas Cowboys in Super Bowl V in 1971.

The trophy stands 22 inches tall and is made from seven pounds of silver. A regular-sized football sits atop of the trophy in a tilted position. Oscar Riedner, the vice president and design director at Tiffany & Co., designed the trophy in 1966.

A lot of things have changed in the NFL since the first Super Bowl. But one thing remained the same: The winning team will get to hoist the Lombardi Trophy at the end of the game.