I'm curious why we only claim 3 national championships. 1908: 10-0 (National Championship Foundation) 1935: 9-2 (Williamson) 1936: 9-1-1 (Williamson, Sagarin) 1958: 11-0 (undisputed) 1962: 9-1-1 (berryman) 2003: 13-1 (BCS) 2007: 12-2 (undisputed) If we use some of our opponents logic (bama, got 12) shouldn't we at least claim some of them?
Why do you want to be like Bama! I am happy with claiming three! I hope we can claim more in the future.
actually, I just threw the bama thing in to tweak Terry, I'm just not sure if the ones we don't claim are by bogus organizantions. I thought Sagarin was legit, but I really don't know.
We claim what is real, and is acknowledged by all as real National Championships. We are real not pretend.
'34-'36 Minnesota had a strangle hold on the media outlets. What would be interesting is to see what their records were in those years. FWIW, you can look at a lot of teams and see they have been voted as Nat Champs a lot more than they choose to recognize. Bama, as example, has been voted Nat Champs 17 times but choose to recognize 12 of them. This debate doesn't tweak me...it's one I find as useless and its about as entertaining as the annual uniform changes threads.
I checked the list at http://www.ncaa.org/champadmin/ia_football_past_champs.html Bama has been named the national champs by at least one organization 17 times. LSU has been named the national champs 7 times (claims 3) Tennessee -- 7 times Georgia -- 5 times Auburn -- 4 times Ole Miss -- 3 times Florida -- 3 times Arkansas -- 2 times
National championships before the NCAA and modern rules came around were handed out like candy. In a number of years there are four or five named champions. Major colleges played very small schools and even athletic clubs and military teams. Rules were very different at the time with no forward pass and the game was very rugby-like. LSU's All-American Hall-of Famer, Doc Fenton, of the undefeated 1908 team, reportedly had already played four years at a northeastern college before attending LSU and playing four more! From the advent of the NCAA in the 1930's until the advent of the BCS, the AP champion is generally considered to be the accepted National Champion. That gives Bama six and LSU three.
