Who Was Charlie Conerly? The Man Behind Mississippi’s Top Collegiate Athletic Award
For those of you who don’t know, the Charlie Conerly Trophy is the annual award presented to Mississippi’s top collegiate football player.
Its namesake, Charlie Conerly of Clarksdale, Mississippi, was the first Mississippian to really ‘make it big’ in professional football and he became perhaps our first homegrown nationally recognized sports icon during his tenure as starting QB for the New York Giants throughout the 1950s.
Inexplicably, Charlie Conerly remains excluded from the NFL Hall of Fame, but our state’s top football award is still aptly named. A few of his career highlights and accomplishments include:
After returning from World War Two, a veteran of the Pacific Conflict, he won the starting job as Ole Miss Quarterback in 1946. In 1947, he led the nation’s most productive offense all the way to the school’s first SEC Championship under legendary Coach Johnny Vaught.
