Just how many national chapionships do we have?

#28
#28
What years did General Neyland coach the Vols? And did he ever coach anywhere else? The only thing I know about him is that when a reporter asked Coach Bryant who was the greatest coach he knew he said "General Neyland."
 
#30
#30
TuskALoosa said:
What years did General Neyland coach the Vols? And did he ever coach anywhere else? The only thing I know about him is that when a reporter asked Coach Bryant who was the greatest coach he knew he said "General Neyland."
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Coached 1926-34, 1936-40, 1946-52 taking breaks to go to Panama with the military and for WWII. He was an assistant at West Point and offered the Iowa and UT jobs, obviously choosing UT.

Pretty good little write-up. Looks like Rockne also called him the greatest coach.

College Football Hall of Fame
 
#32
#32
Just check the school athletic department. Although it does go by school I would think the official athletic department site would be more reliable than any warehouse that can count which polls they feel like counting.
 
#33
#33
does it really matter how many NC's teams have won 60 years ago? it sure doesn't to me
 
#34
#34
ut 4 me said:
does it really matter how many NC's teams have won 60 years ago? it sure doesn't to me
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Agreed. that is why I don't care when Bama fans say they have 2,395,385,348. Good for them. They have one in my life time, and I was too young to remember it anyways. I barley remember UT's actually.
 
#35
#35
tvolsfan said:
Just check the school athletic department. Although it does go by school I would think the official athletic department site would be more reliable than any warehouse that can count which polls they feel like counting.
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The school athletic departments are at least as bad as anyone. Alabama claims 12, ND claims something like 15, USC probably claims 14 -- there have only been roughly 130 seasons of college football played, but there are probably well over 300 total national championships claimed. It's ridiculous.

The very existence of the bowl system is evidence that nobody back in the old days even thought of "THE NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP" in the same way that we do now; if they had, they would have set something up to determine it. Instead, they all preferred to go off around the country and play exhibition games that were so meaningless that A) the final polls were usually taken before the bowl games, and B) the whole team didn't even necessarily make the trip. By the time people really started caring about "THE NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP," the bowl games were thoroughly entrenched, leaving us with the mess that we're still dealing with.
 
#36
#36
Vercingetorix said:
The school athletic departments are at least as bad as anyone. Alabama claims 12, ND claims something like 15, USC probably claims 14 -- there have only been roughly 130 seasons of college football played, but there are probably well over 300 total national championships claimed. It's ridiculous.
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Find me where USC and ND claim that many.
 
#37
#37
I just made those numbers up. But all right, here's a PDF in which Notre Dame discusses the national championship. "Notre Dame is generally considered to have earned 11 consensus national titles. But there have been 19 seasons in which Notre Dame has qualified as a national champion from at least one legitimate poll."

USC doesn't have a separate section on their web page, and I'm not going to read through their whole media guide. Whoever lovingly wrote their Wikipedia page (and you would assume represents the point of view of the Trojan nation) claims 11 titles, and also adds that "USC teams have also been selected as national champions in five other years (1929, 1933, 1976, 1979, 2002) by various nationally published ratings systems. These ratings systems are not generally viewed as part of process of selecting the national championship. USC does not claim to have won titles in any of these years."

The point is that schools themselves are not above engaging in this stuff. The whole process is just crazy.
 
#38
#38
the argument will never be settled, unless the ncaa decides to go and do it, which they won't. However, nd site says 11 consensus national titles. I remember during the game between ND and USC in 2004, they compaired the teams history, saying ND had 11 titles, and USC 10. USC won that year so I believe that.
 
#39
#39
I'm not going to say that all of these numbers are meaningless, but enough of them are that at some point you really have to throw your hands up in the air and say enough. The game has changed enough that there's really no way to sort it all out.

My personal opinion is that the best way to handle it is just to go with the AP poll, as it has been taken continuously for 70 years. If you want to allow for split championships, add in the coaches' poll, which started in 1950. And that's it. Anything else and you're just opening up the door to the anarchy of "retroactive championships," power rankings, and the like.

As I said, though, that's just an opinion, and one I wouldn't argue very strongly to support. The whole situation is such a mess that I don't think there's any "right" way to figure it out.
 
#40
#40
Vercingetorix said:
I'm not going to say that all of these numbers are meaningless, but enough of them are that at some point you really have to throw your hands up in the air and say enough. The game has changed enough that there's really no way to sort it all out.

My personal opinion is that the best way to handle it is just to go with the AP poll, as it has been taken continuously for 70 years. If you want to allow for split championships, add in the coaches' poll, which started in 1950. And that's it. Anything else and you're just opening up the door to the anarchy of "retroactive championships," power rankings, and the like.

As I said, though, that's just an opinion, and one I wouldn't argue very strongly to support. The whole situation is such a mess that I don't think there's any "right" way to figure it out.
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But what about teams like Harvard who want to calim titles before 1970. Oh wait, no one cares about the Ivy League Power. I personally don't see how it matters at all, unless you have won in the last 15 years or so, or you have been near the top over a longer span, like the U.
 
#41
#41
tvolsfan said:
But what about teams like Harvard who want to calim titles before 1970. Oh wait, no one cares about the Ivy League Power. I personally don't see how it matters at all, unless you have won in the last 15 years or so, or you have been near the top over a longer span, like the U.
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The college football that was being played before 1982 was assuredly the same basic thing that you see today (except that we were losing to Alabama every year instead of Florida). The college game that was dominated by the Ivy League was not the same thing at all. I don't know where you draw the line of "before this year it doesn't matter anymore," but it's not 15 years ago.
 
#42
#42
You misunderstand me. Tradition is great, but its hard to get bragging rights for something that far back. You don't go to your friend and brag about old games, because it's pointless, and out of people's thoughts.
 
#43
#43
tvolsfan said:
You misunderstand me. Tradition is great, but its hard to get bragging rights for something that far back. You don't go to your friend and brag about old games, because it's pointless, and out of people's thoughts.
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Say that when you get to be my age, Junior.:) I vividly remember our '92,'79,'78 and a little bit of our '73 NC seasons.
 
#44
#44
TuskALoosa said:
Say that when you get to be my age, Junior.:) I vividly remember our '92,'79,'78 and a little bit of our '73 NC seasons.
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No lie . . . I'll still talk trash about winning the SEC in 1985 to the right person.
 
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