SWC75
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A couple weeks back we had a long thread on the University of Mississippi’s claim that they “won” national championships in 1959, 1960 and 1962. I mentioned that I’d read that Michigan State claims 7 national championships. The SID at Minnesota sated in an article last year that he’d ‘found’ a national championship the Golden Gophers won in 1904 and was adding that to their list of titles. What’s up with this?
The Division 1 college football championship has always been regarded as “mythical” because, unlike in every other sport and every other level of this one, there is no comprehensive tournament including all the major contenders at the end of the season to determine the championship. The BCS matched 1 vs. 2 teams but there’s always more than two legitimate contenders so that didn’t work. The BCS should have been formally recognized only for what it was: a system for getting the best match-ups in bowl games, including a 1 vs. 2 game. Those games then provided evidence for people to consider in formulating their opinion as to who should be the #1 team.
This has given people free reign to determine who they think should be national champion by whatever means makes sense to them. Some organizations have formal polls or committees that awarded national championship recognition based on a consensus of opinion. Others with a mathematical bent have used scored and other factors to come up with what they feel is an objective assessment of how teams should be ranked. You might disagree with the results but this is America and everybody has a right to their opinion. Who is to say any of them are wrong?
This has also given institutions free reign to claim whatever “national champion ships” they want. All they have to do is find someone who voted or ranked them #1. That’s what they did at Mississippi and Michigan State and Minnesota so they could make those claims. I decided to find out what national championships could be claimed by what schools.
You say that the definition of “champion” is that you are better than anyone else and that championships should not be “shared? There should be only one national champion per year? Perhaps. One thing I found in compiling this list is that it’s a better measure of when schools had their greatest teams and eras. That made it more interesting than a list of “consensus” champions who won recognition from the most sources. It’s a better map of the history of excellence in college football. Besides, by “honoring” all they polls and systems, we get another national championship most SU fans probably don’t know about.
I had to decide how far back I wanted to go. Some selectors have rankings that go all the way back to the 1869 Rutgers-Princeton game, even though that was a soccer game. Football was just “soccer” until the 1820’s when at the Rugby school in England they invented a variation on the game that allowed players to pick up and carry the ball. They had to score within a certain number of “downs” or surrender the ball. The Rutgers-Princeton game started a trend for northeastern schools playing “football” matches between teams recruited from their student bodies. But that football was soccer, except at Harvard where they preferred rugby. Harvard heard McGill in Montreal was playing rugby and invited them down to play Harvard. It turned out that McGill had come up with another innovation: teams could retain the ball if they moved it a certain number of yards. The ball could not be “marched” down the filed in a series of incremental gains that could lead to a shot run for a score or a kick for a score, (which would count for less as it was easier). The two schools could not decide which rules to play so someone came up with the idea of playing a double-header, one game under the Rugby rules and one using McGill’s rules. Naturally, McGill beat Harvard at rugby and Harvard beat McGill at what must be called “McGill” ball. Harvard decided they like McGill’s rules and switched to playing that brand of ball. They used the double-header concept to entice their local rivals to play them and the other schools also like the McGill game and eventually all converted. The students who played in these games wound up working throughout the country in physical education and the beginnings of athletic departments and taught the McGill rules, although their origin became obscure overtime.
Rugby was rough but wide-open sport requiring the defense to spread out and cover the whole field. Under the McGill rules, they had to converge on the line of scrimmage and stop those incremental gains. In a way this was duller, with many plays that went nowhere. Teams would voluntarily surrender the ball on the fourth down by kicking it to the other team so that they wouldn’t get the ball close to the kicking team’s goal line. But there was plenty of physical action, which the young men enjoyed. And there was the greater possibility of breaking through the defense and running all the way for a score in an explosive play, something that was less likely in Rugby because the defense was so spread out. But the McGill rules took quite a toll on the young men playing the game. Some were even getting killed. President Theodore Roosevelt vowed to ban the sport unless it could be cleaned up. John Heisman had been present at an 1895 where a panicked kicker had throw a forward pass to a teammate. It was illegal but Heisman became an advocate of opening up the game by allowing forward passes from behind the line scrimmage. Roosevelt’s demands resulted in the formation of the National Collegiate Athletic Association in 1906 and that and Heisman’s advocacy resulted in the legalization of the forward pass at that point.
To me, that’s the beginning of American football as we know it today. Since then there have been changes in equipment and strategical trends, but it’s been the sport we know and love. Also, by 1906 the sport was being played from sea to shining sea: all parts of the country were involved and intersectional games were beginning. I decided that I’d keep track of the “national champions” from 1906 onward.
Also, Service teams are included in some rankings. I’ve always thought they should not be and even games with them should be treated as “exhibition” games because these are not four year colleges: they are military training stations set up during warfare that played football for exercise, (and because certain officers wanted their camp to have a good football team: most of them were full of All-Americans). I can’t eliminate the impact of games against service teams in the rankings but I can ignore service teams that were ranked #1. Where a poll or system ranked a service team #1, I chose their highest ranked college team as their #1 team. For the record, some sources listed the following service teams as their #1 ranked team: Great Lakes Naval Training Station, (1918), Georgia Pre-Flight, (1942), Norman Naval Air Station (1944).
I used two lists of sources. One is from the NCAA Football Record Book:
http://fs.ncaa.org/Docs/stats/football_records/2012/fbs.pdf
(Go to page 69)…and this list which includes many not recognized by the NCAA:
http://www.nutshellsports.com/wilson/
Many of those on the second list are just for gamblers trying to predict current games: they have a ranking for 2012 but not before that. Others are four football historians and go back, in some case all the way to that 1869 Rutgers-Princeton game. If they aren’t on the NCAA’s list it’s probably because they include margin of victory in their calculations, which the NCAA decided is a no-no. I think it should matter so I included them.
There are some strange choices in some cases. The mathematical systems tend to look at all the games and consider bowl games and other big confrontations to be just one of the games they look at. They are also looking at more than just numerical records. The overall resume of a team with a loss might exceed that of a team that is undefeated, even a team that beat them. Some selectors still maintain that bowl games are exhibitions, (as they were once considered to be by the general public) and base their rankings only on the regular season. There are several “national champions” in the polls who lost bowl games and wouldn’t have been voted #1 after the bowls but are still considered national champions today, (Oklahoma 1950, Tennessee 1951, Maryland 1953, Minnesota 1960, Alabama 1964, Michigan State 1965). So selectors who apply the same standards to teams in subsequent decades feel they are being consistent.
So here are the schools and the years for which they could claim a “national championship” because someone selected them as #1:
Alabama 1925, 1926, 1930, 1934, 1941, 1945, 1961, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1992, 2009, 2011, 2012 (19)
Arizona State 1970, 1975, 1996 (3)
Arkansas 1964, 1977 (2)
Army 1914, 1916, 1944, 1945, 1946 (5)
Auburn 1912, 1913, 1914, 1957, 1983, 1993, 2004, 2010 (8)
Boise State 2009, 2010 (2)
Brigham Young 1984 (1)
California 1920, 1921, 1922, 1923, 1937 (5)
Carlisle 2007, 2008, 2011 (3)
Centre 1919 (1)
Chicago 1908, 1913 (2)
Clemson 1981 (1)
Colgate 1932 (1)
Colorado 1990 (1)
Cornell 1915, 1921, 1922, 1923, 1939 (5)
Dartmouth 1925 (1)
Detroit 1928 (1)
Duke 1936, 1939 (2)
Florida 1984, 1985, 1996, 1997, 2001, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2012 (10)
Florida State 1980, 1987, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 (10)
Fordham 1929 (1)
Georgia 1920, 1927, 1942, 1946, 1968, 1980, 2007 (7)
Georgia Tech 1916, 1917, 1928, 1951, 1952, 1956, 1990 (7)
Harvard 1908, 1910, 1912, 1913, 1914, 1919, 1920 (7)
Illinois 1914, 1919, 1923, 1927, 1951 (5)
Iowa 1921, 1922, 1956, 1958, 1960 (5)
Kansas State 1998, 2012 (2)
Kentucky 1950 (1)
Lafayette 1921, 1926 (2)
Louisiana State 1908, 1935, 1936, 1958, 1962, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2011 (9)
Louisville 2004 (1)
Maryland 1951, 1953 (2)
Miami (Fla) 1983, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 2000, 2001, 2002 (10)
Michigan 1918, 1923, 1925, 1926, 1932, 1933, 1947, 1948, 1964, 1973, 1985, 1997 (12)
Michigan State 1951, 1952, 1955, 1957, 1965, 1966 (I could only find 6, not 7)
Minnesota 1911, 1915, 1927, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1940, 1941, 1960 (9)
Mississippi 1959, 1960, 1962 (3)
Missouri 1960, 2007 (2)
Navy 1910, 1926 (2)
Nebraska 1915, 1970, 1971, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1997, 1999 (13)
New Mexico St. 1960 (1)
Notre Dame 1913, 1919, 1920, 1924, 1926, 1927, 1929, 1930, 1938, 1943, 1946, 1947, 1949, 1953, 1964, 1966, 1967, 1970, 1973, 1977, 1988, 1989, 1993, 2012 (24)
Ohio State 1916, 1917, 1920, 1933, 1942, 1944, 1954, 1957, 1961, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1996, 2002, 2006, 2007, 2012 (20)
Oklahoma 1915, 1918, 1949, 1950, 1953, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1967, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1978, 1980, 1985, 1986, 2000, 2003, 2004, 2008 (21)
Oklahoma St. 1945, 2011
Oregon 2010, 2012 (2)
Pennsylvania 1907, 1908, 1924 (3)
Penn State 1911, 1912, 1919, 1921, 1968, 1969, 1977, 1981, 1982, 1985, 1986, 1994 (12)
Pittsburgh 1910, 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, 1925, 1929, 1931, 1936, 1937, 1976, 1980, 1981 (13)
Presbyterian 1918 (1)
Princeton 1906, 1911, 1920, 1922, 1933, 1935, 1950, 1964 (8)
Purdue 1943 (1)
Santa Clara 1937 (1)
So. California 1928, 1929, 1931, 1932, 1933, 1938, 1939, 1943, 1962, 1967, 1969, 1972, 1974, 1976, 1978, 1979, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 (23)
So. Methodist 1935, 1981, 1982 (3)
Stanford 1926, 1940, 2010, 2012 (4)
Syracuse 1923, 1959 (2)
Tennessee 1938, 1940, 1950, 1951, 1956, 1967, 1998 (7)
Texas 1914, 1941, 1947, 1963, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1977, 1981, 2005, 2008, 2009 (12)
Texas A&M 1909, 1917, 1919, 1927, 1939 (5)
Texas Christian 1935, 1938, 2010 (3)
UCLA 1954 (1)
Utah 2008 (1)
Vanderbilt 1910, 1921, 1922 (3)
Virginia 1915 (1)
Washington 1960, 1984, 1990, 1991 (4)
West Virginia 2007 (1)
Wisconsin 1942, 2006 (2)
Yale 1906, 1907, 1909, 1927 (4)
The Top Ten:
Notre Dame – 24 titles
So California- 23 titles
Oklahoma- 21 titles
Ohio State- 20 titles
Alabama- 19 titles
Nebraska and Pittsburgh- 13 titles
Michigan, Penn State, Texas- 12 titles
I’ll add that the “Big Three” of Florida- Miami, Florida State and Florida are all tied with 10 titles each, all since 1980.
The Division 1 college football championship has always been regarded as “mythical” because, unlike in every other sport and every other level of this one, there is no comprehensive tournament including all the major contenders at the end of the season to determine the championship. The BCS matched 1 vs. 2 teams but there’s always more than two legitimate contenders so that didn’t work. The BCS should have been formally recognized only for what it was: a system for getting the best match-ups in bowl games, including a 1 vs. 2 game. Those games then provided evidence for people to consider in formulating their opinion as to who should be the #1 team.
This has given people free reign to determine who they think should be national champion by whatever means makes sense to them. Some organizations have formal polls or committees that awarded national championship recognition based on a consensus of opinion. Others with a mathematical bent have used scored and other factors to come up with what they feel is an objective assessment of how teams should be ranked. You might disagree with the results but this is America and everybody has a right to their opinion. Who is to say any of them are wrong?
This has also given institutions free reign to claim whatever “national champion ships” they want. All they have to do is find someone who voted or ranked them #1. That’s what they did at Mississippi and Michigan State and Minnesota so they could make those claims. I decided to find out what national championships could be claimed by what schools.
You say that the definition of “champion” is that you are better than anyone else and that championships should not be “shared? There should be only one national champion per year? Perhaps. One thing I found in compiling this list is that it’s a better measure of when schools had their greatest teams and eras. That made it more interesting than a list of “consensus” champions who won recognition from the most sources. It’s a better map of the history of excellence in college football. Besides, by “honoring” all they polls and systems, we get another national championship most SU fans probably don’t know about.
I had to decide how far back I wanted to go. Some selectors have rankings that go all the way back to the 1869 Rutgers-Princeton game, even though that was a soccer game. Football was just “soccer” until the 1820’s when at the Rugby school in England they invented a variation on the game that allowed players to pick up and carry the ball. They had to score within a certain number of “downs” or surrender the ball. The Rutgers-Princeton game started a trend for northeastern schools playing “football” matches between teams recruited from their student bodies. But that football was soccer, except at Harvard where they preferred rugby. Harvard heard McGill in Montreal was playing rugby and invited them down to play Harvard. It turned out that McGill had come up with another innovation: teams could retain the ball if they moved it a certain number of yards. The ball could not be “marched” down the filed in a series of incremental gains that could lead to a shot run for a score or a kick for a score, (which would count for less as it was easier). The two schools could not decide which rules to play so someone came up with the idea of playing a double-header, one game under the Rugby rules and one using McGill’s rules. Naturally, McGill beat Harvard at rugby and Harvard beat McGill at what must be called “McGill” ball. Harvard decided they like McGill’s rules and switched to playing that brand of ball. They used the double-header concept to entice their local rivals to play them and the other schools also like the McGill game and eventually all converted. The students who played in these games wound up working throughout the country in physical education and the beginnings of athletic departments and taught the McGill rules, although their origin became obscure overtime.
Rugby was rough but wide-open sport requiring the defense to spread out and cover the whole field. Under the McGill rules, they had to converge on the line of scrimmage and stop those incremental gains. In a way this was duller, with many plays that went nowhere. Teams would voluntarily surrender the ball on the fourth down by kicking it to the other team so that they wouldn’t get the ball close to the kicking team’s goal line. But there was plenty of physical action, which the young men enjoyed. And there was the greater possibility of breaking through the defense and running all the way for a score in an explosive play, something that was less likely in Rugby because the defense was so spread out. But the McGill rules took quite a toll on the young men playing the game. Some were even getting killed. President Theodore Roosevelt vowed to ban the sport unless it could be cleaned up. John Heisman had been present at an 1895 where a panicked kicker had throw a forward pass to a teammate. It was illegal but Heisman became an advocate of opening up the game by allowing forward passes from behind the line scrimmage. Roosevelt’s demands resulted in the formation of the National Collegiate Athletic Association in 1906 and that and Heisman’s advocacy resulted in the legalization of the forward pass at that point.
To me, that’s the beginning of American football as we know it today. Since then there have been changes in equipment and strategical trends, but it’s been the sport we know and love. Also, by 1906 the sport was being played from sea to shining sea: all parts of the country were involved and intersectional games were beginning. I decided that I’d keep track of the “national champions” from 1906 onward.
Also, Service teams are included in some rankings. I’ve always thought they should not be and even games with them should be treated as “exhibition” games because these are not four year colleges: they are military training stations set up during warfare that played football for exercise, (and because certain officers wanted their camp to have a good football team: most of them were full of All-Americans). I can’t eliminate the impact of games against service teams in the rankings but I can ignore service teams that were ranked #1. Where a poll or system ranked a service team #1, I chose their highest ranked college team as their #1 team. For the record, some sources listed the following service teams as their #1 ranked team: Great Lakes Naval Training Station, (1918), Georgia Pre-Flight, (1942), Norman Naval Air Station (1944).
I used two lists of sources. One is from the NCAA Football Record Book:
http://fs.ncaa.org/Docs/stats/football_records/2012/fbs.pdf
(Go to page 69)…and this list which includes many not recognized by the NCAA:
http://www.nutshellsports.com/wilson/
Many of those on the second list are just for gamblers trying to predict current games: they have a ranking for 2012 but not before that. Others are four football historians and go back, in some case all the way to that 1869 Rutgers-Princeton game. If they aren’t on the NCAA’s list it’s probably because they include margin of victory in their calculations, which the NCAA decided is a no-no. I think it should matter so I included them.
There are some strange choices in some cases. The mathematical systems tend to look at all the games and consider bowl games and other big confrontations to be just one of the games they look at. They are also looking at more than just numerical records. The overall resume of a team with a loss might exceed that of a team that is undefeated, even a team that beat them. Some selectors still maintain that bowl games are exhibitions, (as they were once considered to be by the general public) and base their rankings only on the regular season. There are several “national champions” in the polls who lost bowl games and wouldn’t have been voted #1 after the bowls but are still considered national champions today, (Oklahoma 1950, Tennessee 1951, Maryland 1953, Minnesota 1960, Alabama 1964, Michigan State 1965). So selectors who apply the same standards to teams in subsequent decades feel they are being consistent.
So here are the schools and the years for which they could claim a “national championship” because someone selected them as #1:
Alabama 1925, 1926, 1930, 1934, 1941, 1945, 1961, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1992, 2009, 2011, 2012 (19)
Arizona State 1970, 1975, 1996 (3)
Arkansas 1964, 1977 (2)
Army 1914, 1916, 1944, 1945, 1946 (5)
Auburn 1912, 1913, 1914, 1957, 1983, 1993, 2004, 2010 (8)
Boise State 2009, 2010 (2)
Brigham Young 1984 (1)
California 1920, 1921, 1922, 1923, 1937 (5)
Carlisle 2007, 2008, 2011 (3)
Centre 1919 (1)
Chicago 1908, 1913 (2)
Clemson 1981 (1)
Colgate 1932 (1)
Colorado 1990 (1)
Cornell 1915, 1921, 1922, 1923, 1939 (5)
Dartmouth 1925 (1)
Detroit 1928 (1)
Duke 1936, 1939 (2)
Florida 1984, 1985, 1996, 1997, 2001, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2012 (10)
Florida State 1980, 1987, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 (10)
Fordham 1929 (1)
Georgia 1920, 1927, 1942, 1946, 1968, 1980, 2007 (7)
Georgia Tech 1916, 1917, 1928, 1951, 1952, 1956, 1990 (7)
Harvard 1908, 1910, 1912, 1913, 1914, 1919, 1920 (7)
Illinois 1914, 1919, 1923, 1927, 1951 (5)
Iowa 1921, 1922, 1956, 1958, 1960 (5)
Kansas State 1998, 2012 (2)
Kentucky 1950 (1)
Lafayette 1921, 1926 (2)
Louisiana State 1908, 1935, 1936, 1958, 1962, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2011 (9)
Louisville 2004 (1)
Maryland 1951, 1953 (2)
Miami (Fla) 1983, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 2000, 2001, 2002 (10)
Michigan 1918, 1923, 1925, 1926, 1932, 1933, 1947, 1948, 1964, 1973, 1985, 1997 (12)
Michigan State 1951, 1952, 1955, 1957, 1965, 1966 (I could only find 6, not 7)
Minnesota 1911, 1915, 1927, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1940, 1941, 1960 (9)
Mississippi 1959, 1960, 1962 (3)
Missouri 1960, 2007 (2)
Navy 1910, 1926 (2)
Nebraska 1915, 1970, 1971, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1997, 1999 (13)
New Mexico St. 1960 (1)
Notre Dame 1913, 1919, 1920, 1924, 1926, 1927, 1929, 1930, 1938, 1943, 1946, 1947, 1949, 1953, 1964, 1966, 1967, 1970, 1973, 1977, 1988, 1989, 1993, 2012 (24)
Ohio State 1916, 1917, 1920, 1933, 1942, 1944, 1954, 1957, 1961, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1996, 2002, 2006, 2007, 2012 (20)
Oklahoma 1915, 1918, 1949, 1950, 1953, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1967, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1978, 1980, 1985, 1986, 2000, 2003, 2004, 2008 (21)
Oklahoma St. 1945, 2011
Oregon 2010, 2012 (2)
Pennsylvania 1907, 1908, 1924 (3)
Penn State 1911, 1912, 1919, 1921, 1968, 1969, 1977, 1981, 1982, 1985, 1986, 1994 (12)
Pittsburgh 1910, 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, 1925, 1929, 1931, 1936, 1937, 1976, 1980, 1981 (13)
Presbyterian 1918 (1)
Princeton 1906, 1911, 1920, 1922, 1933, 1935, 1950, 1964 (8)
Purdue 1943 (1)
Santa Clara 1937 (1)
So. California 1928, 1929, 1931, 1932, 1933, 1938, 1939, 1943, 1962, 1967, 1969, 1972, 1974, 1976, 1978, 1979, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 (23)
So. Methodist 1935, 1981, 1982 (3)
Stanford 1926, 1940, 2010, 2012 (4)
Syracuse 1923, 1959 (2)
Tennessee 1938, 1940, 1950, 1951, 1956, 1967, 1998 (7)
Texas 1914, 1941, 1947, 1963, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1977, 1981, 2005, 2008, 2009 (12)
Texas A&M 1909, 1917, 1919, 1927, 1939 (5)
Texas Christian 1935, 1938, 2010 (3)
UCLA 1954 (1)
Utah 2008 (1)
Vanderbilt 1910, 1921, 1922 (3)
Virginia 1915 (1)
Washington 1960, 1984, 1990, 1991 (4)
West Virginia 2007 (1)
Wisconsin 1942, 2006 (2)
Yale 1906, 1907, 1909, 1927 (4)
The Top Ten:
Notre Dame – 24 titles
So California- 23 titles
Oklahoma- 21 titles
Ohio State- 20 titles
Alabama- 19 titles
Nebraska and Pittsburgh- 13 titles
Michigan, Penn State, Texas- 12 titles
I’ll add that the “Big Three” of Florida- Miami, Florida State and Florida are all tied with 10 titles each, all since 1980.
