By David Barron
The 40-pound block of granite is back.
After a perplexing swerve from its traditional roots, the Rotary Lombardi Award will be relaunched in Houston this year as an honor for college football linemen or linebackers. The winner again will receive the granite-topped trophy that was inspired by the award’s namesake, the late coach Vince Lombardi.
The award, founded in 1971 by the Rotary Club of Houston, will be presented Dec. 8 at a dinner benefiting the American Cancer Society, the longtime beneficiary of the Lombardi Trophy banquet. The award was created with the cooperation of the Lombardi family in the wake of the coach’s death from colon cancer in 1970.
The Rotary Club ceded control of the event in 2017 to a newly created Lombardi Foundation, and the award was refashioned as an award for the best college football player of the year, regardless of position.
The dinner was refashioned as the Lombardi Honors event, with additional awards given to coaches, media members, former players and public figures.
There was no mention of those subsidiary awards in the release announcing the 2021 award. Also, as if to accentuate the return to tradition, the release announcing the relaunched award and Rotary’s sponsorship did not include the names of the last four winners of the redesigned award, which included two backs and a safety.
Under the restored rules, the Lombardi Award will go to a down lineman or end on offense or defense who lines up no further than 10 yards to the left or right of the ball or to a linebacker who line up no further than five yards from the line of scrimmage. Offensive players who come out of the backfield to be set on the line prior to the snap are not included in the eligibility requirements.
The trophy topped by a 40-pound block of pink granite, commemorating Lombardi’s college years with the “Seven Blocks of Granite” line at Fordham University in the 1930s, was the most recognizable symbol of the Lombardi Award.
It was replaced by a trophy featuring a figure of Lombardi standing alongside a player, first presented in 2017 to Stanford running back Bryce Love. Subsequent winners included Oregon safety Ugochukwu Amadi, LSU quarterback Joe Burrow and 2020 recipient Tulsa linebacker Zaven Collins.
That trophy, however, is now a thing of the past as the traditional rules, the familiar trophy and the longtime association of the Rotary Club of Houston return for 2021.
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