12/21/24
November 25, 2015
College Football Belt Backlog: The definitive (I believe) trail from Rutgers-Princeton 1869 to Nebraska-Alabama 1972, this proves that the College Football Belt site starts with the right team. This is how bored I was at work today. Starting at the first recognized college football game (Rutgers vs. Princeton, November 6th, 1869) and using the nearly complete records on SportsReference.com, I traced the lineal College Football Belt through the 1972 Orange Bowl, after which point the good people at College Football Belt start up.
According to this college football reference site Arkansas State was 1-8 in 1954 after going 8-0-2 in 1953. I'm wondering if the sparse records for 1954 were because they were playing in some lower division of college football. In any event, if that site is correct, they had almost certainly lost the belt to someone else by the time they played Mississippi State in October.
posted by bender at 05:00 PM on November 24, 2015
I had to search the coach for that year (Glen Harmeson) on CFBDataWarehouse, but Arkansas State's only win that year was their first game, and their second game was Mississippi State. September was only barely in the CFB season for a long damn time.
posted by Etrigan at 10:18 AM on November 25, 2015
[this is good]
Excellent scholarship. The CFB site needs to be revised to reflect that it originates with the first game ever and stop talking about Nebraska in 1972. Only then will the Belt ascend to its rightful place as something ESPN mentions occasionally on SportsCenter.
I turned your list into a table to make it format properly. Sorry the site's code botched it the first time around.
posted by rcade at 11:34 AM on November 25, 2015
The CFB site does acknowledge that someone else also figured this out, but without listing the games involved. I do wish they'd make that more prominent.
posted by Etrigan at 11:50 AM on November 25, 2015
I turned your list into a table to make it format properly. Sorry the site's code botched it the first time around.
Thanks. My HTML skills start and stop at "googling this thing and taking the first result", hence my basic fixed-width command and a bunch of manual tabs.
posted by Etrigan at 11:51 AM on November 25, 2015
Excellent. Fascinating to see that it works out in the end, when it could have become mired somewhere below what is now Division I or even expired by being held by a team that disbanded its football program. I wonder what team has had the most chances at the Belt without ever winning it?
posted by Rock Steady at 04:24 PM on November 25, 2015
I find the geographical location of the belt holders as the years progressed to be quite interesting. Naturally enough it starts with the Northeast, and then shifts to the Midwest at the end of WW I. There was a brief return to the Northeast in the late 1940s to early 1950s, fueled somewhat by the service academies, and then the shift to the Southeast, Southwest and West Coast began. There were a couple of brief Midwest trips in the late 1960s, but for the most part the belt remains in the warmer climes. Were my mapping and computer skills up to the task, a sort of "The Route of the Belt" presentation would be very nice.
Great work, Etrigan.
posted by Howard_T at 11:49 AM on November 26, 2015
The "???" after Mississippi State taking the belt from Arkansas State in 1954 is because I couldn't find any record of Arkansas State's other games that season (they didn't lose any after beating Memphis in 1953). The game was in week 3, and apparently the Red Wolves were pretty good for a smaller school at that point, so I trusted to luck that they didn't drop an earlier game to some other school that no one bothers keeping track of.