In 1940, four major college football teams finished undefeated.
The Minnesota Golden Gophers finished 8-0 after an impressive win over 7-1 Michigan. The Stanford Indians finished 10-0 after a Rose Bowl win over 8-2 Nebraska. The Boston College Eagles ended the season with a Sugar Bowl win over previously undefeated Tennessee to finish 11-0.
Our Mississippi State Bulldogs finished the season 10-0-1. The tie came against Auburn in Birmingham, and the season ended with an Orange Bowl win over 8-2 Georgetown.
The SEC was mathematically a stronger conference than any of the other undefeated teams’ conferences. Boston College scored the most points per game, while MSU allowed the fewest.
With no playoff system or BCS, the only way to determine a national champion was for polls to just pick one. And back then, the final polls came out before the bowls, so sometimes the “national champion” would lose its bowl game.
In 1941, the AP Poll, the most respected poll in college football, chose Minnesota as the national champion, leaving three other teams without any losses empty-handed.
Back then, sometimes organizations, or even random individuals, would come back years later and make lists of national champions. And today, some schools claim these after-the-fact lists as real national championships. All of a sudden, the BCS doesn’t seem so bad, does it?
Alabama claims 12 “national titles.” Of course, five of those were declared retroactively by organizations or individuals who had no official power and didn’t even exist during these years.
In 1941, Alabama went 9-2 and lost to 9-1-1 SEC Champion Mississippi State yet still claims a national title thanks to one of those silly retroactive polls.
And in 1964 and 1973, Alabama lost its bowl game and still claims a national title thanks to polls that released their final ballots before the bowls.
Two of Ole Miss’s three claimed “national titles” are suspect, with only one-man made up mathematical by-hand formulas (Dunkel in 1959 and Litkenhous in 1962). Ole Miss supplements its title claims from those years with after-the-fact rankings released years later.
So if Alabama, Ole Miss and many other teams can claim national titles retroactively, why can’t we? Especially when many teams claim national titles that were just lists made by some guy?
I hereby establish an official list of national champions, the “Nelson List.” I’ll even let you look at it online (no space to print it here) at no cost.
I will begin the list at an arbitrary year, 1935. I encourage all teams on this list to officially claim a “national title” for this year. And look, I even threw an extra couple to Alabama. I’m sure the banners are already being printed.
Seriously, if other teams are going to claim phony-baloney “national titles,” we should, too. In fact, until we have a playoff, all national titles are just made up on people’s opinions.
If Dunkel, Billingsley and Dickinson can have their opinions flown as banners, why can’t mine? It’s honestly just as legitimate.
And who’s to say the 1941 opinions of the Helms Athletic Foundation of who the best team was in the 1910s is any less legitimate that what I say in 2009 about 1940?
Let’s just print the banner and hang it. Sure, it’s meaningless, but so are all other national title claims, especially those from the pre-BCS era. But if everyone else is claiming titles and using it to make themselves feel superior, why not us, too?
Oh, to address the message board fad of claiming a 1941 national title: it just doesn’t make sense. Don’t get me wrong – I bought one of those shirts myself – but we can’t claim a title in a year we lost to a team (Duquesne) that went undefeated. It just seems wrong to claim that one.

The Nelson List:

Harry Nelson is the opinion editor of The Reflector. He can be contacted at
[email protected].