The history of HBCU college football national champions

This week, Memorial Day Morning QB dives in to begin rectifying a relative lack of appreciation for HBCU college football and its national champions.

BOISE, IDAHO — As I wake up on this Memorial Day morning in the land of the Smurf Turf, my mind is drifting not to the land of Group of Five schools but rather another even more marginalized realm of college football. On my first day at the North American Society for Sport History conference here in Idaho’s capital city, one of the presentations piqued my interest in a subject that frankly gets way too little attention and appreciation.

That subject is the history of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and their impact on the broader history of college football. Too often, when we think about the experience of non-white athletes in the sport, our appreciation of that history begins with the struggle to integrate college football teams at larger state universities.

I am as guilty of this as anyone else. Sure, I love the Celebration Bowl and make it appointment viewing every year on the first day of bowl season. But even with my interest in college football’s little guys, I have failed to date to look deeper into the history of HBCUs and their broader impact on the game.

This sin of omission discounts the decades of college football played before the sport integrated across the country in the wake of the movements fighting for greater civil rights for people of color in the United States. In today’s Sunday Morning Quarterback, let’s dive in and take the first steps toward remedying that omission by looking today briefly at the history of HBCU national champions.

The early years of black college football at HBCU institutions

In the early years of college football all across the country, there were the games on the field and little more. There was no playoff structure, no bowl games, and no polls. This was true at all levels of the college game, even at the HBCU level.

Thus, while teams have claimed national championships prior to 1920, there is no mechanism to determine who actually qualifies as the best in a given season. Once the Roaring Twenties hit, black national champions started to emerge in the press. After the Pittsburgh Courier declared the first HBCU champion with their coronation of Howard and Talladega College as co-champs in 1920, it became an annual tradition.

What did not happen, though, was any retroactive declaration of previous champions from 1919 and earlier. While Livingstone College claimed a national title as early as 1906, no backcasting was ever actually undertaken by selectors of the 1920s or beyond.

Thus a 7-0 Bison team and a 5-0-1 Tornadoes squad were jointly named the first “official” champions of HBCU college football. Howard did not allow a single point on their path to perfection. Meanwhile, legendary HBCU coach Jubie Bragg followed up at Talladega College with another unbeaten 6-0-1 season and a share of a second consecutive national title in 1921.

1923 marked the first attempt to play a championship game at the end of the season between the two best HBCU teams. Lincoln and Howard met at the end of the year to play in the Colored Championship Game. Results were anything but definitive, as the two teams played to a 6-6 draw in the contest. The idea of an annual championship game fizzled over the years as interest waxed and waned around the concept.

Who can lay claim to the most HBCU national championships?

Just as in FBS football, the reliance on a poll selection process has not always led to a decisive pick as a given year’s national champion at the HBCU level either. In 57 of the 99 seasons of HBCU football, there have been co-champions declared.

The Tennessee State Tigers boast the most claimed titles, with 16 to their name. Right behind them is Grambling State, where Eddie Robinson won nine of the school’s 15 observed national championships over the course of his legendary career.

With 14 black national championships, the Rattlers of Florida A&M are third in the all-time list. They are also the only HBCU to win the NCAA Division I (FCS) football tournament, claiming the title in the first season after the I-A/I-AA split in 1978. That year, Rudy Hubbard’s Rattlers went 12-1 and took down Massachusetts in the championship game to secure the crown.

Tuskegee and Southern round out the top five as well as the list of teams with 10 or more HBCU titles. The Golden Tigers have won 13 championships, most recently in 2016, while the Jaguars lay claim to finishing top of the HBCU mountain in 11 seasons. In total, 40 different historically black colleges and universities can lay claim to at least one national title in their histories.

There is still much work to be done in this realm.

While there is some extant information regarding national championships at the HBCU level of the sport, college football has not been great about preserving these memories. We need to dive into the archival resources and learn more about these contests and these championship squads.

The Celebration Bowl, the current iteration of a black national championship game pitting the MEAC champion against the SWAC champion, has been great at shining a light on modern HBCU contributions to the sport and rewarding excellence at that level. But the game itself and its official website offer little that would link 21st-century champions to their forebears a century earlier.

Similarly, the NFL has been happy to highlight HBCU traditions and the impact of black college football on the pro ranks. But the focus on the link between HBCUs and the NFL serves to further obfuscate the impact of HBCU football as an entity unto itself.

So stay tuned throughout the summer, as we take the opportunity both on Sundays in this column and throughout the rest of the season to highlight historically black colleges and universities and their unique flavor of college football.