Based on the standards of Alabama’s silliest title claim, these 78 teams can award themselves national championships

Dubious national championship claims have been part of college football for decades, most recently turning 2018 into endless 2017 Playoff fallout debate.

It makes sense that Alabama’s athletics director and some Tide players have clapped back at the Knights in public, but it’s also ironic that UCF’s self-declared championship means questioning one of Bama’s fairly won title claims ...

Like, way sillier and harder to defend than UCF’s undefeated season.

Most of Bama’s title claims are perfectly valid! A couple (1978, 1973) are debatable at best, and there’s actually one the Tide should start claiming (1966).

In a season with four undefeated teams before bowl games (when the final AP Poll came out at the time) and three afterward, the Tide got shut out by both Mississippi State and Vanderbilt.

They finished third in the SEC and ranked No. 20 in the final AP Poll. The bowl win over Texas A&M was pretty nice, but wouldn’t have moved Bama into the final top 10 or anything.

No one thought about this team again until around 1983, when the athletic department’s information director went back and claimed a bunch of old titles, basing 1941’s off an old formula by statistician Deke Houlgate, who’d died in 1959.

The Houlgate System — don’t worry if you’d never heard of it before today — is one of many obscure rankings recognized by the NCAA as a title “selector,” which doesn’t mean the Houlgate (or any other system) was empowered to award official titles, just that the NCAA felt it was about as valid as anything else going on in a sport with no actual championship.

Kentucky, Minnesota, Oklahoma State, Texas A&M, and USC are a few who’ve treated themselves to retroactive crowns. Many of those are actually defensible, the “this thing in the NCAA book says we’re No. 1” argument applies to UCF as well, and most of Bama’s revisionist histories are fine.

And just because one selector named a team No. 1 doesn’t mean common sense should go out the window. Many schools have teams that were named No. 1 by one oddball computer or another, but choose to apply some ration and shame instead of running wild.

So let’s say we don’t care about the Houlgate System all that much.

Oh, they’d also have to find somebody who’ll say, “You were actually the best team that year,” but it’s possible to find at least one person who believes literally anything, so that should be easy.

(Below this list, I’ll preemptively field questions from a select portion of Alabama fans.)

Q: Why are you so obsessed with us?

Every college football outlet posts about the Tide a lot. Your team is big, famous, successful, and interesting.

Q: Why are you so salty about our lies?

I know the rules of modern discourse mean every interaction must boil down to both sides claiming the other person is incredibly mad, with the winner being the side that convinces more neutral parties about the other side’s boiling rage, but I’m typing this on the back porch while listening to kids jumping on a trampoline. I’ve almost never felt less mad.

Q: Why did you pour so many hours into this list if you’re not obsessed with how bad our dumb number is?

That list took me about 20 minutes. I’ll probably double check it, after I finish handling these questions.

Q: Give it a rest, Georgia fan. Things that are old don’t matter.

I’m not a Georgia fan, and if it doesn’t matter, why do people rise to defend it every time it’s laughed at?

Q: It’s so old. Who cares?

It’s still in the media guide, recruiting materials, team merchandise, and on the field during each title game. Presumably, Bama would agree “17” is more marketable than “16.”

Q: Slow news day, loser?

It’s Friday afternoon, May 11.

Q: Why is the very sick lib media once again screeching hysterically into a diaper about Bama’s success? They hate us ‘cause they ain’t us.

I’m not The Media — I just made a blog post, is all — and here’s what my facial expression looked like for most of the last half hour: :|

It also looked like this, when I typed the parts about, like, VMI winning a title and couldn’t help but giggle: :D

At no point all day have my emotions risen above room temperature, even before I started this post.

Q: It was a different era. There was no title game, so there was no official champion. You can’t compare a two-loss team retroactively claiming a title 40 years later based on the ancient opinion of one person’s calculator to a team going undefeated.

We’ve found accord.