Our MNC Wednesday miniseries started back in late March 2020, when the US went into Covid lockdown—and millions of lives were saved by it, thankfully. We stopped doing current-day analyses with the advent of the College Football Playoff’s expansion in 2024, although the 2023 disgrace was our intellectual conclusion. We then returned to fill in the seasons from the distant past, going back to the year of the first “Rose Bowl” … ending last week on a high note, as planned. Now, it’s time for a full accounting.

First and foremost, our selections for the mythical national championship certainly didn’t always jibe with the choices made by whatever decision makers of the time. To wit, between 1936-2023, when a myriad of different systems were used to determine a “champ”? We agreed just 40 times with those selectors in that 88-season span, for a confirmation rate of just 45.5 percent. We used our combination of common sense, sabermetric data, and other factors to determine our champions, which we feel are more sound.

That got more difficult with less data available in the 1901-1935 era, where we confirmed just 12 champions in that 35-season range, and some of those had been picked by “experts” as mere co-champions, too. That 34.3-percent confirmation rate was even lower than in the “modern era”—although, again, maybe that was to be expected with our access to advanced analytics these days. Overall, for those counting at home, that means we agreed with just 52 national champions in 123 years of college football. Ouch!

In mathematical terms, that is a 42.3-percent “success” rate for whatever process was in place, overall. That’s not confidence inspiring, in terms of understanding the past, factually. There are also a lot of schools that claim MNCs in multiple years where they weren’t “picked” by whatever system existed. There really should be some serious scholarship done on those lies, but that’s not our role, obviously. Even if we used our idea of the most sensible methodologies, there are big feelings in the sport that cry.

Now, the obvious question(s) left to answer is which schools did we “anoint” the most often? We know this is what people want to know, in contrast to all those MNC claims made by schools and their biased fan bases. Our tally below does include the 2024 and 2025 CFP champions, too, since those are the most “official” of the whole sport’s history, really, in terms of holding a legitimate tournament to decide a victor. Here is the list for the schools with realistically legitimate MNC counts in double digits:

  • USC: 13
  • Ohio State: 12
  • Notre Dame: 10

It’s a short list, but we’re pretty confident in its accuracy. We’re not going to provide individual links to each season where we chose those schools as the champions, but they’re easily located on this site by clicking the tag at the bottom of this page and scanning the articles for the “MNC” headlines. We will note that USC’s range of championship seasons runs from 1931-2007, while Ohio State’s title range is 1935-2024, and Notre Dame’s champ span is from 1924-1993. Those dates alone should track.

With the top tier out of the way now, what about the “second tier” of schools, those with at least five MNCs to their credit? This is where it gets trickier, of course, but again, we stand by our long-term analyses and methodologies. As noted in many cases, we’re not 100-percent confident in every pick, but we still can rationally argue for our picks using data, math, and unbiased information. That being said, here is the next group, and it’s obviously not a lot bigger than the above club of MNC exclusivity:

  • Michigan: 6 (1925-1964)
  • Yale: 5 (1902-1923)
  • Minnesota: 5 (1909-1941)
  • Michigan State: 5 (1950-1955)

The spans of time are what stand out here the most, really. At this point, these titles are all in the distant past, and for three of these schools, they started building their kingdoms early in the process. And Michigan State’s unique profile is by far the most concentrated of all the schools in the analyses: the Spartans posted a 44-3 record in their five championship seasons against very impressive schedules, despite posting a losing record in the single year during that stretch that they did not earn our MNC crown.

Obviously, these nine schools make up a total of 56 championships, leaving 67 other titles up for grabs among a lot of other colleges. We don’t want to list them all, but we will highlight a third tier of schools that put together at least three MNC campaigns over the decades. Again, we’re very aware that a lot of colleges make false claims to multiple MNCs they do not have a legitimate avenue to grab. Those are the waters of this sport, which is almost a spiritual obsession to many people in this country, strangely.

Here is the next group of schools worth noting, in this category, and it is certainly revealing as to how much subjective bias has been a part of the MNC determination process since … the beginning, really:

  • Tennessee: 4 (1938-1998)
  • Texas: 4 (1963-2008)
  • Penn State: 4 (1982-2005)
  • Florida State: 4 (1992-2013)
  • Auburn: 3 (1910-1983)
  • Illinois: 3 (1914-1919)
  • Georgia Tech: 3 (1915-1928)
  • Alabama: 3 (1965-2015)

Teams like Georgia Tech and Illinois did their damage before the media poll(s) started picking champs in 1936, while the other schools could be identified as “the usual suspects” or whatever label is appropriate. There is a serious elephant in this group—no pun intended, honestly—just as there was in the second tier, in terms of schools who certainly have given themselves more credit than they have earned … and who also have received more credit than they deserved from selectors over the years, due to hype.

Again, we stand by our selections with mathematical and sabermetric confidence. And now, including this group of three-time (at least) MNC winners, we have covered 84 seasons of the 123 campaigns we dissected in our long-time process. That leaves 39 other seasons, and there are a handful of schools with two championships to their credit, as well, and this is our fourth tier, so to speak. Still, these are noteworthy, as winning two MNCs over the years is still worth shouting about from the campus rooftops:

  • Princeton: 1903, 1922
  • Georgia: 1920, 2022
  • Pittsburgh: 1936, 1980
  • Army: 1945-1946
  • Iowa: 1956, 1958
  • Nebraska: 1971, 1995
  • Oklahoma: 1975, 2000
  • Miami-FL: 1987, 2001
  • Washington: 1991, 2023
  • Clemson: 2016, 2018

There are more surprises in this group, in terms of colleges that seemingly “have won more than this”—but that was the whole point of this process, to breakdown whatever system may have been used at the time to choose with updated data and information, not to mention common sense. Either way, this brings our total to 104 championships, meaning there are less than 20 teams with a singular MNC to their credit. We’re not listing those, because we’ve gone on too long here already. Feel free to peruse the archive.

This whole process could be revisited in another decade or so if we still have the inclination, but at this moment in time? We rest.