Auburn: The Barn shatters the CRINGE meter
- Thread starter justinkjones1993
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I've never thought this was a good argument, either.
Oklahoma won back-to-back national championships on probation in 1974-75, the first year included a bowl ban. And while they didn't win any of the "recognized" national championships in 1984, Florida was deemed national champion that year by 21 of 47 selection bodies (more than BYU) and missed their bowl game because probation was imminent.
"Teams on probation get ranked" has always been the norm in the AP poll, to the point the voters (once it was formalized) had to do assent to doing it. The UPI (coaches) poll didn't allow teams with bowl bans to be ranked.
It would have been better if they all had the Medal of Honor around their necks.
A few? The only title we "claim" that's questionable is 1941. The rest were awarded by the AP/UPI aside from the four pre-AP/UPI titles which were Rose Bowl wins (the de facto national title game from that era). And speaking of 1941, Kentucky claimed a title in 1950 yet finished 7th in the AP; Illinois finished 5th in 1951; USC finished 3rd in 1939; Tennessee finished 4th in 1940 AND 2nd in 1938; Georgia finished 2nd in 1942; Pitt finished 3rd in 1936... yet only Bama catches hell for 1941.
What Auburn did would be equivalent to us claiming 1937, 1945, 1966 and 1977 because we were either undefeated or had what was considered the best team (but wasn't ranked first by the AP/UPI. And if Auburn can claim 1993 because they finished the regular season undefeated, then that means we can claim 1994 and 2008?
Do you see the difference now?
This is just,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, pathetic.
And to think their children will have this mindset passed down to them. Sad really.
And to think their children will have this mindset passed down to them. Sad really.
That's Buster Brownwho is the little dude in the '93 picture. is that bowden? if so,
Never did I suggest that 93 was a legitimate title out of their 3 more modern claims. In fact I suggested out of the 3 it was the weakest and most arbitrary.
We didn't win the Rose Bowl after the 1926 season (it was a tie) and what a versatile argument we make.
The truly amazing part is that until 1986, none of these teams ever had any idea the were national champions, and it was pulled off by a guy with an agenda.
Every single team you listed above won a conference championship when it meant something, too, except for Pitt who won.......the Rose Bowl.
Personally, I think all of those "claims" are rubbish. Bear Bryant died knowing he'd won six national championships but now he's won 7.
Because it is so self-evidently goofy that nobody with a brain would have ever done it.
There was no Rose Bowl game for their first 3 claimed titles, two teams undefeated. This is 81's point - we're about the last people on planet earth that need to be mocking them for THAT.
Auburn's claims of 1983 and 1993 and for that matter 2004 are so obviously goofy that it deserves the mockery it gets.
I think the reality is that "claiming" national titles decades after the fact is STUPID at every level no matter who does it. There are players from the 1925 team who died who never knew they were "national champions" and yet we recognize them as such?
The other reality is that even their attempts to close the gap on the national titles has obviously backfired and made it where they cannot complain at all about ours. Good luck wearing their "nine-time champion" shirts while looking idiotic.
Selma - if they have nine now, then by that same standard how many could we claim now...?
(Asking for a friend.)
Selma - if they have nine now, then by that same standard how many could we claim now...?
The point is “who cares?”. The metric for national championships is so subjective prior to 2006 that you could make a case for anytime things were close. Many of our pre 1973 titles were either because 1) there was no metric 2) the B1G-PAC political shutout of the SEC or 3) the fact that ND and MSU didn’t play bowl games. So you could literally say anytime that someone said you were national champs or had a great record. A big reason the 1964 national championship is controversial is because Arkansas went undefeated and BEAT Texas on the road whereas we lost to them on a neutral site. But no one wants to point out the reason we were awarded it was because of the ND situation. But can you really blame Arkansas fans for claiming it?
The point is that it really doesn’t matter as much anymore just don’t make outrageous ones like 1941.
Selma - if they have nine now, then by that same standard how many could we claim now...?
I think the entire discussion is ridiculous at every level INCLUDING (to a point) on our part.
When I first became an Alabama fan, it was understood 1961 was our first national championship. I can show you article after article (and I have seen one in the Alabama student newspaper in early 1962) saying 1961 was our first national championship. I have mug after celebratory glass after commemorative whatever purchased before 1986 that shows we had six national championships.
So how did we get here? A guy at Alabama with a "Notre Dame inferiority complex" wanted us to have more titles than they so he began hunting every specious suggestion Alabama won a national championship from whatever source he could find. Had he not been so consumed with winning the war after it was long over, he might have done well. The 1941 claim is so ludicrous, so preposterous, so beyond any level of defense that I can do little more than roll my eyes that anyone ever claimed it.
But then again a number of our Johnny-come-lately after-the-fact defenders (most of whom were not around when the title claims suddenly doubled overnight) have a vested interest in not retracting a claim once made, which has led to comments every bit as absurd like, "we should stop recognizing 1941 but take 1945." In other words, "we refuse to admit this was a bad idea and we can't jiggle the numbers so this is my creative solution to this problem."
Alabama has - probably - the most glorious history on the field of any team in the history of college football INCLUDING Notre Dame, whose legendary status has taken a hit now that they've gone 37 years without a national championship. We don't have to live out the "Southern inferiority complex" by making over-the-top claims. Okay, there will never be a "Knute Rockne: All-American" movie about us but that was an accident of timing and history and the coincidence that one of the stars later wound up President. And yet the moment someone makes a claim, the Alabama response is, "Well how many MORE can we claim," which sounds like a certain person obsessed with crowd sizes.
According to John MacCallum, who wrote a series of fine books on all of the conferences between 1970 and 1980, NOTRE DAME was the first team to retroactively claim a national championship via Dickinson months after the 1924 season ended and used it to tout their program. Notre Dame's fame rests largely on their proximity to Chicago (at the time the second largest city in the US), where most of the non-New York sportswriters lived - and Rockne and the Irish understood the importance of their games being on radio.
Now having said that, there's an obvious difference in what Auburn did and what Alabama did - because Alabama did not claim national titles where their fan base or school had cried like babies about being "robbed" by the poll voters. The "old" claims of Auburn - 1910, 1913, 1914 - I mean, who really cares? I'm sure I can see in THEIR student newspaper where 1957 was their first national title, too. But 1983 is like Alabama claiming 1977, which we don't do. And 1993 is the essence of victimhood. Keep this in mind: Auburn both then AND NOW insists that the Eric Ramsey scandal was manufactured by the University of Alabama because of the four Iron Bowl losses in 1986-89. I wish I was kidding, but I'm not. So, you see, their probation in 1993 was in their minds undeserved, it was Alabama's fault, and this is the way to stick it in Alabama's face as well as have another 2009-10 scenario where we win and then they win, too.
And of course, the Fambly is right there to say, "But what about Alabama." But what about Alabama? Alabama did not claim national championships years after the fact after whining about losing them. Only Auburn did that.
Auburn logic goes like this: You can only be the fan of a school you attended but you can claim a national championship you cried that you didn't win.
And I think that says the whole thing right there.
I have less issue with their 1983 claim than the other 2 modern ones that they added. However I would have still probably said Nebraska was more deserving of the national championship claim than both Auburn and Miami. Yes I’m aware Miami beat Nebraska in the Orange bowl and they did it because Osborne didn’t want a tie. But I’m also aware that Miami was #5 and Auburn was #3, and Auburn beat Florida whereas Miami got destroyed by Florida.
So 83 is one of those I have been wondering why they didn’t claim to start with.
I would have sworn that I had seen newspaper clippings (actually pics of such) with headlines about Alabama's victory over Washington in the 1926 Rose Bowl which described it as a "national championship."
But I'm having a hard time finding anything now.
But I'm having a hard time finding anything now.
Because everyone who is alive knows how controversial that selection was. They KNOW they didn't win it.
They COULDN'T claim it because there are actually people alive who know what happened. THEIR OWN COACH said in the wake of that that there comes a time in everyone's life when they get screwed and this is our turn (that's pretty much word-for-word).
Look, they absolutely 100% got jobbed that year, worse than we did in 1977. They played one of the most brutal schedules ever assembled, and they stubbed their toes once. They faced an absolute gauntlet coming down the stretch:
#5 Florida at home - the team that beat Miami and did it quite easily
#7 Maryland - the ACC champions with QB Boomer Esiason
#4 Georgia - IN ATHENS, and going into that game, UGA's record was 41-3-1 since the start of 1980, and two of their three losses were to the team that won the national championship (81 Clemson, 82 Penn St)
#19 Alabama - how good were we? well not many 4-loss teams finish ranked #12. We lost four games by a combined total of 23 points and that included the ref botch at Penn State, a snowstorm in Boston, and the most horrid torrential rain you've ever seen at Legion Field in the Iron Bowl.
And that doesn't include a blowout win in Knoxville against a 9-3 Vols team that somehow wasn't ranked at the end of the season.
But whether they should have won it or not, they never claimed it because they knew better. Miami basically won it because the press had declared Nebraska the greatest offense ever all the way back in October. Indeed, that's why the Kickoff Classic matched up Auburn and Miami to start the 1984 season, their way of "settling" it which was ludicrous as too many players from both teams were gone.
There is, but it's irrelevant.
It was a term coined in 1920 by a sportswriter named Henry Farrell, who called it MYTHICAL. The citation of the Rose Bowl as the national championship back then was about like when a baseball player achieved something and it was said (long before 1939) he had "entered the Hall of Fame." OBVIOUSLY he had not entered THE Hall of Fame because it didn't exist, it was a colloquial term as is MNC.
I mean, baseball for years has called their championship team "world champions," but how many other countries even play baseball much less compete at that high a level? Even when the Blue Jays won it in 1992, it was technically little more than "the best team on the North American continent."
Well the point is there was a notion even then of some sort of championship having been won. Not that it was what the national championship became in the ensuing decades, but more than to simply wave it off as irrelevant, IMO.
It is not so far fetched to look back and say, hey we are going to recognize those teams from the pre-AP era that clearly would have gotten serious consideration had such a poll existed.
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