Imagine if the Stanley Cup was instead called the Glass City Goblet or the Super Bowl champion received the T-Town Crown.
In other words, imagine if one of the greatest prizes in sports was named after Toledo.
There was a time you didn’t have to.
On Monday night, Georgia and Texas Christian will play for a big trophy presented to the college football national champion.
But let the record state, it will not be the biggest such prize.
One larger trophy (literally) is none other than the Toledo Cup.
You know, the groundbreaking award that for a time in the 1930s was among the most significant pieces of hardware in sports.
The one sponsored by the old Toledo Scale Company that the Associated Press called the “first symbol of the mythical football championship.”
Yeah, that one.
Who knew?
I’ll admit, when I came across a long-ago wire story on the Toledo Cup during a recent stroll through the archives, it rang only the faintest of bells.
But in a fascinating footnote of local and football history, it’s true: The road to gridiron glory once cut through Toledo.
From 1934 to 1936, the powers of the day — every program from Ohio State and Michigan to Alabama, Notre Dame, and Bernie Bierman’s Minnesota dynasty — competed for the Toledo Cup, a 30-inch silver trophy awarded to the college football champion, as voted by a group of 250 sports editors from newspapers across the nation.
In an era filled with regional polls and obscure mathematical rankings, the honor was among the first attempts to crown a true national champ.
All I knew was I had to learn more, setting off on this column with more questions than a Jeopardy! winner.
Among them:
What’s the story behind the Toledo Cup?
Where in the world is it now?
Can we reintroduce it?!?!
Fortunately, I think I got some answers.
Start from the top, in 1934.
While some details are lost to history, it seems the Cup was the creation of Hugh Bennett, a football fan and president of Toledo Scale, then the world’s largest manufacturer of automatic scales, and Westbrook Pegler, a popular national sports columnist.
Pegler was the secretary of a sponsoring board that included Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., longtime International Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage, and Ohio State athletic director Lynn St. John, among other big names.
As the men saw it, the Toledo Cup filled a void in the college football landscape. At the time, there was only one national championship trophy — the Rockne Trophy — awarded at the whim of the Dickinson System, a math formula that ranked teams from 1925 to 1940. The new award would allow a little subjectivity, relying on a coast-to-coast collection of the newspapermen who covered the sport.
In a letter to newspaper editors — including in Toledo, where The Blade was one of the city’s three dailies — Pegler wrote: “Mr. Bennett and the sponsoring committee believe that there is room in the country’s sporting life for some such method of selecting a championship team; and likewise they believed that no persons are so well qualified to make this selection as a carefully chosen body of newspaper sports editors.”
Real quick, here’s how it worked.
In a rough precursor to the AP poll — which began as we know it in 1936 — the 250 sports editors submitted two postseason votes, first ranking their top three teams, then selecting one of three finalists on a final ballot.
To the champion went the Toledo Cup, along with a set of top-of-the-line scales. The team would hold the grand trophy for a year, then pass it on to the next winner.
At least that was the idea.
In an interesting stipulation, a school could gain permanent possession of the Cup by winning it three straight years, and, lo and behold, one program showed no interest in sharing.
That was Minnesota, which under the direction of Bierman was beginning the great dynasty of its time. The Gophers ran away with the Cup in 1934 — they received 224 first-place votes; Alabama had 23 — then again in ‘35 and ‘36.
Each year, their Toledo Cup titles were trumpeted in exclamatory wire dispatches and celebrated in a pomp-filled ceremony at the Minnesota Field House. In the last such presentation, university president L.D. Coffman told a cheering crowd: “We are pleased to have this trophy become the permanent property of the [school]. Whatever sentiment we may attach to it now will undoubtedly be enhanced as the years pass.”
And so it has.
True to his word, the Toledo Cup endures at Minnesota — the last FBS school to win three straight national championships — as a front-and-center reminder of its football golden age.
When I asked about the trophy’s current whereabouts, a university spokesman promptly shot me back a photograph. It’s in its own lighted glass display at the entrance of the school’s Gibson-Nagurski Athletic Center.
“The Toledo Cup highlights a historic time during our program’s history and we are honored to be the only school to earn the Toledo Cup,” senior associate athletic director Paul Rovnak emailed. “Its brief — yet historic — tradition is something that separates Minnesota from its peers and is part of the uniqueness and charm of college football.”
That is, unless ... hmm.
Could the Toledo Cup ever return?
Call me crazy, but I think I speak for no one in asking: Who can be certain this fun quirk of Toledo history really went away for good? Maybe the race for the Cup — discontinued with the arrival of the AP poll — is just on an 86-year break.
I took the question straight to the top.
“Are you talking about me sending a division of Navy SEALS to Minneapolis to physically return the literal cup to Toledo?” Toledo Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz asked. “Or are you talking about returning to the custom of awarding a new Toledo Cup to the college football national champ?”
The latter.
“There are some logistical issues, to be sure,” he said, “beginning with the need to find a presenting sponsor.”
But ...
“If hosting the Super Bowl of Italian football at the Glass Bowl [this summer] or building a boxing ring and hiring actors to re-enact the 1919 Dempsey-Willard fight doesn’t prove that I’m open to fun and creative ways to celebrate Toledo’s rich sports heritage,” he said, “then I don’t know what does.”
So, you’re telling me there’s a chance!
Either way, long live the Toledo Cup.
First Published January 7, 2023, 1:30 p.m.
