So What is Heavyweight Football Champs All About, Anyway?

Let's face it. The current system of determining college football's national champion has its issues. In fact, any system that we can come up with will have its flaws. Any of us who remember the days before the BCS and the Bowl Coalition and all of that can tell you just how good the polls were at determining the best. Computers aren't really the answer because there's no way you can enter the intangibles into a computer formula. A March Madness type year end tournament will be a disaster for the regular season. Even if you don't agree with that last comment, we can all probably agree that anything better probably isn't going to happen for at least several years.

Much of the problem is there are too many teams and too few games to make this an easy proposition.

With that in mind, I'm proposing something new. And old. Heavyweight Football Champs. By the name, maybe you can guess the approach I'm suggesting. What if we start crowning our national champions the way heavyweight boxing crowns its champs? Very simply, the champion remains the champion until someone beats him. The one who beats him becomes the new champ.

See, the beauty of college football is that every game matters. To a certain extent, the regular season is a tournament. You have to win every game if you want the best shot at the title. So to build on that, I decided to take a closer look at this heavyweight football concept, to see who the reigning champ would be if this had been done from the beginning.
I wondered where to start. Oklahoma had a long dominating run several years ago. In 1902, Nebraska was not only undefeated, but unscored upon. There are a lot of good starting points, but I decided it would be best to go back to the beginning, to the very first college football games. I had some very simple rules:

1. I started with the first college game, Rutgers against Princeton, November 6, 1869. Rutgers won, 6-4, and therefore was declared the first champion.

2. Each game that was played by the champion following was a championship contest, with the winner being declared the new champion. The only stipulation was that both teams playing had to be considered major colleges (or later, Division 1 schools, more recently Division 1A or FBS schools). Contests against non-major schools were not counted.

We have developed the site with a listing of every chamionship game played in College Football History. It is our intention to develop team sites with championship game data for every college football team. Of course, I have to make a living, so developing these team sites will take time.

Following this method, in 2005 I traced every game from that first Rutgers Princeton game on forward. Heavyweightfootballchamps.com was first published in 2005. Because of family and work schedules, there was some down time the past couple of years for the site, but it has been fun to watch the seasons and championships evolve over the years. So far, the closest thing we've had to a Buster Douglas has probably been Kentucky with their one game championship in 2010.

Granted, this format does not always allow the teams currently recognized as the best to play each other for the championship. Then again, not even the BCS seems to be able to claim that. But it is enjoyable to have a National Championship game almost every week of the season. No other system can say that!

A Note About the Color Scheme on the Site. It has been a tradition since the founding of this site to use the school colors of the reigning champion as the primary color scheme for the site. This is our way to honor the reigning champion. We have been accused in the past of favoring certain schools as evidenced by the colors we used. When a new champion assumes the title, the colors will change accordingly.

Finally, a special thank you to David Wilson for putting together his college football site. If you are at all interested in college football and its history you have to go there. He has compiled a lot of data including historical football scores, information and/or links to information on everything from all different versions of national championships, ratings, award winners, All America selections back to the 1800's. All very nicely done.

Ron Walter, owner, heavyweightfootballchamps.com