Same coach, same signature, same kind of ticket. The game decided the price.

A ticket stub is the ideal object for this test, because it has almost nothing else going for it. It is a scrap of printed card, worth nothing on its own. Put the same signature on two of them and the only thing left to differ is the date printed on the front.

The game he lost

On 26 December 1960, in front of 67,325 people at Franklin Field in Philadelphia, the Eagles beat Lombardi's Packers 17-13 for the NFL title. It was only his second season in Green Bay, and the Packers ended it deep in Eagles territory as time ran out.

It was the only postseason defeat of his career as an NFL head coach, leaving aside a third-place exhibition game in 1964. Over the following seven seasons Green Bay won five championships, including the first two Super Bowls.

A stub from that game, signed by Lombardi and authenticated by PSA, sold at Heritage in 2022 for $1,500.

The game he won

On 31 December 1967, the Packers played the Dallas Cowboys for the NFL title at Lambeau Field. The official temperature at game time was thirteen degrees below zero, and it is still recorded as the coldest game in NFL history. The field's heating system had failed and the playing surface froze. The Packers won 21-17 on a quarterback sneak by Bart Starr in the final seconds, their third straight title.

Signed stubs from that game have sold twice at Heritage: $25,200 in 2022 and $19,800 in 2024. Against the 1960 stub that is somewhere between thirteen and seventeen times the price.

It is not the signature

Both stubs carry the same man's name, signed in the same decade by someone who died in 1970 and never saw the autograph-show era. Both were authenticated by PSA. Nothing about the handwriting distinguishes them.

It is not scarcity, or not much

The obvious explanation would be that far fewer Ice Bowl stubs exist. The attendance figures do not support it. The 1960 game drew 67,325; the Ice Bowl drew 50,861. The Ice Bowl crowd was about a quarter smaller.

We cannot know how many stubs from each game survived, or how many Lombardi signed. But a crowd a quarter smaller does not account for a price thirteen to seventeen times higher. Something else is doing most of the work.

It is the game

What the buyer of an Ice Bowl stub is paying for is the Ice Bowl: the frozen field, the cold, the last drive, the sneak, a dynasty's third straight title. Lombardi's signature on it is a certificate that he was part of it.

The 1960 stub carries the same certificate for a game people mostly remember as the one he lost. Collectors know exactly what that signature is attached to, and they price the attachment.

The same pattern elsewhere on this index

This is not a Lombardi quirk.

On Roger Maris's page, the two dearest items are tied to his 1961 home-run record: a signed stub from the game in which he hit his 61st, and a signed bat attributed to his 60th. A ball carrying the inscription about the record sold for roughly twice two plain ones.

On Rocky Marciano's, a pair of gloves he wore and signed in his title fights with Jersey Joe Walcott sold for seventeen times a signed pair he never fought in. The gloves are a less pure test than the stubs, because the fight-worn pair is a different physical object. But the direction is the same.

Three signers, three sports. In each case the item tied to the famous moment sells at a large multiple of the same kind of item without it.

Even the premium is not fixed

One more detail from the Lombardi stubs. The two Ice Bowl copies sold two years apart, and the later one made about a fifth less. Same game, same signature, same authenticator.

That is the same lesson as two identical labels selling far apart: a certified object carries a range, not a price. The Ice Bowl premium is enormous, but it is a band rather than a number.

What to take from it

Read the date before the signature. On event items, the occasion is most of the value. A stub, a programme or a photograph is priced by what happened that day.

Do not assume the famous game means the rarer object. Here the cheaper stub came from the bigger crowd, but not by nearly enough to explain the gap.

And expect the premium to move. Two copies of the same Ice Bowl stub sold a fifth apart.

The thing worth sitting with

Lombardi signed both tickets, and his hand did not change between them.

One records the only championship game his Packers lost under him. The other records the game that helped give Lambeau Field its nickname, the Frozen Tundra. The market has decided, very precisely, which of those afternoons it would rather own.

This index records documented sales of Lombardi's signed material, most of which, unusually, is paperwork. You can read how we work the numbers out.

Sources