While patronizing a local wing joint before the big game last week, I spied a UM football fan proudly wearing a maize and blue hat that declared that Michigan was an 11-time national champion in football. Bullshit, I thought.
However, upon inspecting Wikipedia later that evening, I learned that Michigan does indeed claim 11 national titles, about half of these occurring over a hundred years ago, and many where multiple schools claim the same year. For reference, the AP poll didn't begin until the mid-1930s.
Alabama too claims many national titles, and indeed, several of these are recent and well earned. However, in the 1980s Alabama started recognizing five pre-Bear Bryant national championship teams simply because their sports information director added them to the University's Football Media Guide. BAM, history! Alabama claims a title in 1941 where they finished 20th in the final AP poll.
The point is, so long as schools have some rational claim to a title—or even if they don’t apparently—they are free to recognize the title and nobody is likely to notice. I think Ohio State already did this once, recognizing two titles in 1961 and 1970 that previously went unrecognized by the school. But why stop there when we can have more titles than our rivals?
In looking at Ohio State's history, there are at least four years where OSU could make a plausible claim to a title that it has not asserted. These years are 1916, 1917, 1933, and 1944.
The 1916 and 1917 years are especially important to OSU lore, because those were teams that Chic Harley played on that eventually led to the building of Ohio Stadium. There are already three other claimants in 1916, and while there is only one other claimant in 1917, OSU went undefeated both years.
In 1933, OSU was named a national champion according to the Dunkel System (whatever the hell that is) and again, there are already three claimants that year (one being UM). Ohio State was named champs by the National Championship Federation in 1944 which is good enough for me in 2018.
With this information in hand, I call upon the power of the Eleven Warriors fan base to get the ear of an SID and get these titles added to the 2019 OSU football media guide. The stadium is constantly under renovations, so hanging the new title placards there should be a piece of cake this offseason. Isn't it time we claimed all of our bullshit titles like the rest of the college football blue bloods? The winners write the history. After OSU's historic win this weekend, I want to buy some OSU 12(13?)-Time National Champion swag.
-credit to Wikipedia.org for most of my information
