There used to be a website called the College Football Data Warehouse that had an extensive database of all the national title selectors and reviews for each year. It made sense and it discounted our 1941 retrospective Houlgate title that wasn't claimed by us until the early 1980s when our sports department happened to write an article, not really thinking things through.
The methodology established major and minor titles and did a nice job of cutting through the confusion.
Here's what's funny: the first team to CLAIM a retroactive national championship (per John McCallum, who wrote histories of nearly every major college football conference) was NOTRE DAME, who claimed their first championship (1924) several months after the fact by Dickinson.
Wayne Atcheson's stunt would have been defensible - when our national title count miraculously rose from six to 11 in 1986 - IF he had simply let 1941 go and not let his zeal to "somehow we have to have more than Notre Dame" get the best of him.
Bear (pardon the pun) in mind....
I don't think anyone should be taking any national championship prior to 1960 or so seriously anyway. That's just my personal take on it, but aside from the fact it turns into a manhood measuring contest anyway, the problem is that prior to the mid-50s, the polls were shamelessly biased in favor of the Eastern and Midwestern (re: Big Ten) teams and had no oversight. I composed
a rather long Tidefans thread that covered the inside and outside of every single national championship in the poll era at the time I wrote it. I'm sure a lot of Auburn fans - and this is rich coming from them of all people - would characterize my objection as, "You conveniently start to exclude our 1957 title" but that isn't really the reason why. I have no objection to any Auburn fan who want to say they won a title before we did since if you look at journalism AT THE TIME (and not after Atcheson's magic act), they did.
But it should also be noted they won their title by the purely legal (this is why it had to change) tactic of
stuffing the Associated Press ballot box. As I stated in one post in that thread, the SEC had no fewer than ten teams run the table undefeated in the first 22 years of poll voting that got hosed in the final ballot. AUBURN changed all of that with a tactic that was both sleazy but fair game at the same time. Ironically, their way of winning a national championship made ALL of ours more legitimate despite the carping online of a few obsessed fans of Little Brother.
I personally think the whole "let's find something that makes us the equal of Notre Dame" was wrong, short-sighted, and vulnerable to the point where the 1941 claim is so monumentally absurd that nobody should be defending it nor should be come up with the excuse "we should count 1945" just because some Bama fans also have a complex.
My take is simple: I have a hard time recognizing a team years later as a national champion when that team themselves never even knew they won a national title. No ring, no trophy, no banner, no parade, nothing - but all of a sudden a guy with research tools and a shameless bias rewrites history. The 1961 team KNEW they had been awarded a national title - and in my mind such is legitimate. But given the way titles could be haphazardly awarded prior to the rules revision that quantified the poll votes in 1960, I have a hard time taking any NATIONAL title in football prior to that with any seriousness at all.
It would be like the US retroactively saying that "since you never defeated us on the field of battle" and "since no war was declared," the USA won the Vietnam War. It's ridiculous to say that and how I feel personally about the whole thing. And I know most Tide fans don't agree with me - but I can live with that.