Kentucky Football Makes A Trophy For The 1950 National Championship That They Didn't Actually Win

COLLEGE SPUN – While many had justifiable gripes with how college football chose its national champion during the BCS era, things were so much worse decades ago, when a champion was named before bowl games were even played. The 1950 Oklahoma Sooners are the consensus national champions from that year, despite going on to lose the Sugar Bowl to one-loss Kentucky. Princeton and Tennessee were also voted by some organizations as national champions that season, but the Wildcats did not lay claim to the title that year…until now.

The Sagarin Ratings, a computer rating system created by statistician Jeff Sagarin, began to name unofficial national champions in 1978, but went back to retroactively award titles to teams that came out on top in previous years based on the model. Kentucky finishes No. 1 in the 1950 Sagarin Ratings, and the program has now created a trophy for itself to celebrate it, modeled after the famous crystal Coaches’ Trophy.

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This is sneaky one of the funniest stories to come out of college sports in a longgg time. Big Blue Nation, you know I love you guys, but you might want to skip over this one. Because I went over all this a dozen times, and if I’m understanding correctly…

A stat guy invented a computer ratings system in 1978…

He used that model to go back and award titles to teams…

Got to the 1950 season (played almost a full 30 years before this system was invented) and the data showed Kentucky as #1, even though Oklahoma was the consensus champion that year, while Princeton and Tennessee also received votes, and UK was 7th in the final AP poll…

And now Kentucky is not only using this one dude’s statistical model to claim an NCAA National Championship title…

But built themselves a trophy for it and displayed it in a glass case in the lobby of the new training center…

And made a webpage for it on their site under “Football Tradition – National Champions.”

That is some next-level stuff right there and I’ll be god damned if I don’t respect the hell out of it.

It’s genius when you think about it too. I mean, what’s the Internet Attention Span for a story? 3 days? So you’ll get laughed at for a few days. People will write snarky blog posts and tweet some crying face emojis. Since we’re talking about SEC sports here, it will probably carry over onto the field with signs and heckling for next season. But then everyone forgets about it, and a few years go by, and next thing you know, 17 year old recruits are walking through those doors and seeing that big ass trophy while you talk about “National Champion” Kentucky and their rich tradition.

That my friends is how you establish a culture of winning without actually doing the winning part. Like I said, genius.