Five consecutive Grey Cup championships, a streak no other Canadian Football League franchise has matched, grew out of the front office Norm Kimball built. Kimball, the general manager who assembled that Edmonton Eskimos dynasty, died in September 2026, at 96, according to 3DownNation.

A native of Edmonton, Kimball entered the Eskimos organization in 1961 as its minor football coordinator. He was promoted to general manager in 1964 and spent the next 21 seasons running the club. In the early 1960s he also became the main organizing force behind the Alberta Football Coaches Association, the forerunner of today's Football Alberta, and helped drive the province's first coaching clinics; in 1971 the association gave him a Life Membership Hall of Fame Award for that grassroots work, years before the professional game recognized him in the same way.

The Eskimos won the Grey Cup under Kimball in 1975, then reeled off five consecutive championships from 1978 through 1982, a stretch credited to him by the Canadian Football Hall of Fame and ranked by the Alberta Sports Hall of Fame among the most dominant runs the league has seen. Across his tenure the club reached nine Grey Cup finals in ten years and won six of them. 3DownNation put his overall regular-season record at 199 wins, 141 losses and 12 ties.

Kimball's influence reached beyond his own roster. He chaired the CFL's General Managers committee from 1971 to 1974, then took over the league's Player Relations Committee in 1975, leading negotiations with the Canadian Football League Players' Association for years afterward.

He left Edmonton in 1985. The following March he became part owner, president and chief operating officer of the Montreal Alouettes, then operating as the Montreal Football Club. That franchise folded on June 24, 1987, closing out his time as a team executive.

Edmonton inducted Kimball into its Wall of Honour in 1990. The Canadian Football Hall of Fame elected him as a builder on May 11, 1991, and the Alberta Sports Hall of Fame enshrined him in 2011 for turning the Eskimos into one of professional sport's most consistent winners.

Football Alberta still hands out the Norm Kimball Coach of the Year Award each season to the province's top coach across every level of the sport, closing a loop between the amateur coaching clinics Kimball ran as a young organizer in the early 1960s and the professional dynasty he built two decades later. The five-peat he built in Edmonton remains the only run of its kind in Grey Cup history.