NFL Referees Get Super Bowl Rings Too — The Hidden Honorees of the Championship

The Referee's Ring

At the conclusion of every Super Bowl, the NFL presents championship rings not only to the players, coaches, and staff of the winning franchise, but also to the officiating crew who managed the game on the field. The rings given to officials are typically distinct from those of the winning team — usually less elaborate and produced at the discretion of individual leagues and crews — but they are genuine Super Bowl rings, marking the officials' participation in the championship game.

The tradition reflects a philosophy about the role of officiating in professional sports. Referees are not neutral observers who happen to be present; they are active participants in the game's outcome, making hundreds of decisions in real time under extreme pressure, and the integrity of the result depends directly on the quality of their work. Recognizing them with a ring acknowledges that their contribution to the game is real and consequential.

What It Takes to Officiate a Super Bowl

The path to officiating the Super Bowl is its own form of elite athletic achievement, though one that unfolds entirely in the mind and the rulebook rather than on the field. NFL officials are evaluated throughout every regular-season and playoff game, and the crews that officiate postseason games — and ultimately the Super Bowl — are selected based on performance metrics that include penalty rates, accuracy on replay review calls, and subjective evaluations of game management.

Unlike players, NFL referees are not full-time employees of the league. Until 2017, they were part-time workers who held other careers during the week and officiated on weekends. Veteran referee Ed Hochuli, one of the most recognized officials in league history, maintained a law career throughout his officiating tenure. In 2017, the NFL began offering officials the option to become full-time employees, a shift that reflected the increasing complexity and scrutiny of the officiating role.

The crew that officiates a Super Bowl has typically worked together for years. NFL crews are assembled and maintained as units, with each of the seven officials — referee, umpire, head linesman, line judge, field judge, side judge, and back judge — assigned specific responsibilities and zones. Cohesion and communication within the crew is considered as important as individual technical knowledge.

The Ring as Symbol of Presence at History

Super Bowl rings hold a particular place in American sports culture as artifacts of championship achievement. The rings given to players by winning franchises have grown increasingly elaborate over the decades — the Dallas Cowboys' 1995 Super Bowl ring contained 14 diamonds; recent rings from the New England Patriots era featured over 280 diamonds and weighed nearly half a pound. The rings given to officials are more modest, but their significance as markers of presence at a historic event is no less real.

There is something philosophically interesting about an officiating crew receiving the same category of recognition as the players. Sports championship culture typically celebrates the people who scored the points, threw the passes, and made the tackles. The referee's ring is a quiet acknowledgment that the game is also a system — a set of rules that must be administered impartially for the competition to be legitimate — and that the people who maintain that system are as essential to the spectacle as the athletes themselves.

The Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, maintains a collection of Super Bowl rings from various years, including examples from officiating crews, as part of its documentation of the championship's history. For a group of professionals whose names are rarely known outside dedicated football circles, the ring is often the only tangible public record that they were there when history was made.