1935 College Football Season

Pre Bowl National Titles
Billingsley, Litkenhous, Boand, & Poling NC - Minnesota (8-0)
Dickinson & Houlgate NC - SMU (12-0)
Williamson NC - TCU (11-1) & LSU (9-1)
Dunkel NC - Princeton (9-0)
No AP Rankings.

Stanford 7, SMU 0 (Rose Bowl)
TCU 3, LSU 2 (Sugar Bowl)
Catholic 20, Ole Miss 19 (Orange Bowl)

quote:
In New Orleans, the second annual Sugar Bowl pitted Texas Christian (TCU) (11-1-0) against SEC champion Louisiana State (LSU) (9-1-0) before a crowd of 38,000. TCU's Sammy Baugh, later to go on to NFL fame, was forced out of the end zone on a pass attempt, and the safety gave LSU a 2-0 lead. Two minutes later, Baugh drove the Frogs to the 17 yard line, setting up Taldon Malton's field goal. The final score was TCU 3, LSU 2 [13]

1936 College Football Season

Pre Bowl National Titles
Billingsley, Litkenhous, Dickinson, Dunkel, & Poling NC - Minnesota (7-1)
Williamson NC - LSU (9-0-1)
Boand & Houlgate NC - Pitt (7-1-1)

Pre Bowl AP Poll
1. Minnesota, 7-1 ... IDLE
2. Louisiana State, 9-0-1 ... SUGAR
3. Pittsburgh, 7-1-1 ... ROSE

Pittsburgh 21, Washington 0 (Rose Bowl)
Santa Clara 21, LSU 14 (Sugar Bowl)
Duquesne 13, Miss. St. 12 (Orange Bowl)
TCU 16, Marquette 6 (Cotton Bowl)

quote:
"There is no longer any blot left on Pittsburgh's Rose Bowl escutcheon," wrote Grantland Rice. "Here was a Panther who belonged to the jungle and not to the zoo-- a fast, hard driving slashing Panther who put both fang and claw to work in beating Washington's Huskies 21 to 0 before 87,200 chilly witnesses.".[5]

Pitt had been ranked #3 by the AP, behind #2 LSU, which met Santa Clara in the Sugar Bowl. #1 ranked Minnesota, like other Big Ten teams, was not allowed to play postseason. LSU had lost the previous Sugar Bowl to TCU, by a 3-2 score. A crowd of 41,000 turned out in New Orleans, only to see the Tigers lose again. The Santa Clara Broncos took a 14-0 lead in the first quarter and won 21-14.[6]

A crowd of 17,000 turned out in Dallas to watch the first Cotton Bowl Classic. Sammy Baugh of Texas Christian completed only 5 of 13 pass attempts, but had 110 yards, a touchdown, and the win, as TCU beat Marquette 16-6.[7]

Paul Williamson, the man who awarded LSU two math system national titles in 1935 & 1936, turns out to have been a New Orleans geologist who was on the Sugar Bowl Committee. :/

According to a SI article, the story goes like this ( LINK):

quote:
Polls and systems to determine the No. 1 team are not nearly so ancient as the mere naming of the "intercollegiate champion" by a Casper Whitney or a J. Parmly Paret. Ironically enough, they can be traced back only 40 years, to none other than good old Knute Rockne at good old Notre Dame.

It happened like this. In 1926 a teacher of economics named Frank G. Dickinson at the University of Illinois was a football buff who privately enjoyed rating teams by his own mathematical formula. He happened to mention this in class one day, and a student in the back row who was sports editor of The Daily Mini wrote a story about it. The story came to the attention of a Chicago clothing manufacturer named Jack Rissman, another football buff, who decided he would like to use Dickinson's ratings to select the top team in the Big Ten each year so that he could present a trophy to the winner. When Knute Rockne heard about this, he invited both the professor and the clothing manufacturer to lunch at South Bend and said, "Why don't you make it a national trophy that Notre Dame will have a chance to win?" Never one to miss out on a good thing, Rockne also persuaded Dickinson and Rissman to predate the whole thing a couple of years so that the 1924 Irish—the Four Horsemen team—could be the first official, system-rated national champion. Notre Dame has always had a lot of ways to beat you.

For better or for worse, Dickinson's system was relatively simple. At the end of a season he divided all teams into two categories—those that won more games than they lost, and those that did not. He then awarded points for victories over teams in the first division and fewer points for victories over teams in the second division. Quality of schedule was not a factor but, just as inequitably, the number of games played was, except for bowls. Still, the Dickinson system was accepted by football fans as the law until well into the 1930s. By then a lot of other systems had been originated.

The first followed Dickinson by one year. It was perfected by a man in Los Angeles named Deke Houlgate who would later write a ponderous 9-x-13 work titled The Football Thesaurus. Houlgate bluntly admitted that his rating system, begun in 1927, was designed to counter the "Midwest sectionalism" of Dickinson's.

Next came William F. Boand with a system called "Azzi Ratem" in 1928. His selections were published annually in The Illustrated Football Annual, and, like Dickinson, he predated his choices back to 1924. Curiously, for the 1937 edition of the magazine Boand went back 13 years and "rerated" the top teams, taking bowl results into consideration.

The syndicated experts came on the scene in 1929 with the emergence of Dick Dunkel's "power index." Paul Williamson, a geologist by profession and a member of the Sugar Bowl committee, began his widely accepted "power ratings" in 1932. And Frank Litkenhous and his brother Edward started his "difference-by-score" formula in 1934. Aside from their not overly revealing names, the details of how these systems work have been kept a close secret by the various inventors.

This post was edited on 4/30/13 at 6:43 pm