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The Stanford National Championship Tree - Hank 91 - 06-26-2013

On SportsCenter last night they had a graphic listing UCLA's 109 national championships, and they gave it a catchy name -- the UCLA Pyramid of Success, an appropriate nod to John Wooden. Anyway, I was wondering how our 104 championships broke down. Here it is by number and with the last championship year in parenthesis.

17 -- Women's tennis (2013)
17 -- Men's tennis (2000)
10 -- Men's water polo (2003)
8 -- Men's swimming (1998)
7 -- Men's golf (2007)
7 -- Women's swimming (1998)
6 -- Women's volleyball (2005)
5 -- Men's gymnastics (2011)
5 -- Women's cross country (2008)
4 -- Men's cross country (2004)
4 -- Men's track and field (2000)
3 -- Women's water polo (2012)
2 -- Men's volleyball (2010)
2 -- Women's basketball (1992)
2 -- Baseball (1988)
1 -- Women's soccer (2012)
1 -- Women's lightweight rowing (2010)
1 -- Women's rowing (2009)
1 -- Men's basketball (1942)
1 -- Football (1926)

Source: http://champions.stanford.edu/history/stanfords-national-championships/

Re: The Stanford National Championship Tree - doublespiral - 06-26-2013

Too bad that Ultimate isn't sanctioned by the NCAA.  :)

We'd have 9 more championships - 7 for the Women's team and 2 in the Open division.

It's been a little while since their last crown, but our women dominated for a decade: http://sports.espn.go.com/ncaa/news/story?id=2932843



Re: The Stanford National Championship Tree - washingtonismoney - 06-26-2013

Why doesn't Stanford claim 1940 as a national championship in football? We've got to be the only major school that undercounts our national championships in football.

Hell, 'bama will announce tomorrow it discovered some extra championships in there and are now claiming 55 of them.

Re: The Stanford National Championship Tree - Bruce Wang - 06-26-2013

Good point, WIM.  I'm gonna start claiming it.

Re: The Stanford National Championship Tree - stupac2 - 06-26-2013

(06-26-2013, 04:48 PM)washingtonismoney link Wrote:Why doesn't Stanford claim 1940 as a national championship in football? We've got to be the only major school that undercounts our national championships in football.

Hell, 'bama will announce tomorrow it discovered some extra championships in there and are now claiming 55 of them.

What's odd is that the wikipedia entry for us claims it and cites our official page (linked in OP) which doesn't. That had me pretty confused for a bit when I was wondering how many we claimed.

Re: The Stanford National Championship Tree - Farm93 - 06-27-2013

(06-26-2013, 08:32 PM)stupac2 link Wrote:[quote author=washingtonismoney link=topic=8052.msg63665#msg63665 date=1372290485]
Why doesn't Stanford claim 1940 as a national championship in football? We've got to be the only major school that undercounts our national championships in football.

Hell, 'bama will announce tomorrow it discovered some extra championships in there and are now claiming 55 of them.

What's odd is that the wikipedia entry for us claims it and cites our official page (linked in OP) which doesn't. That had me pretty confused for a bit when I was wondering how many we claimed.
[/quote]

Football still lacks a true NCAA team title for the FBS level teams, so the type of chaos noted here is common.  Then there are probably 20 or more sports that have, or had, some level of national championship, but do not have broad enough support to get the NCAA championship designation.  (Sync swim, rugby, sailing, ultimate, etc.)  IMHO it is always best to stick with the NCAA team title tally.  For example, Harvard has 4 NCAA Team Titles, but 143 national titles including 44 in squash.

Re: The Stanford National Championship Tree - yvonne - 06-27-2013

Then no FBS team would have football in their tallies.

Re: The Stanford National Championship Tree - Farm93 - 06-27-2013

(06-27-2013, 07:11 AM)Yvonne link Wrote:Then no FBS team would have football in their tallies.
Right!  C.a.l should not count their 5-8 titles.  USC should not count their 11, or whatever is left after their vacated titles.  Stanford should not count their 1 or 2.  Or at least they should not be lumped together as equivalent to NCAA team titles like was presented at the start of this thread.

Also football can be lumped in to a national title list, but only when lumping in ALL of the other non-NCAA national titles.  If a list includes football, it should then list all of the others in that grab bag on non-NCAA team title sports (rugby, squash, men's rowing, table tennis, etc.)  Many sports in that grab bag are actually more worthy than football since they have global appeal and/or IOC backing.  Though I am not advocating sub-tiers within the grab bag of non-NCAA.  However, the grab bag lists should always clearly note the type of title.  (NCAA or "other")

And using that methodology it would be easier to see that the list at the start of this thread includes 102 NCAA team titles, and not the correct total of 104.

Lightweight rowing and football are not in Stanford's NCAA 104 tally, while women's swimming and men's golf should both sit at 8 rather than 7.  FWIW - Stanford's website now claims 121 national championships and that 104 NCAA total.

104 is just a few behind UCLA.  121 is deep in the pack as a few schools have dozens of titles in non-NCAA sanctioned championships.  (Harvard, Arizona State, etc.)

Re: The Stanford National Championship Tree - Farm93 - 06-27-2013

(06-27-2013, 08:39 AM)garvin link Wrote:A lot of schools use 1936, the year the AP poll began, as their cutoff on this.
Sure, but the schools that won football titles before 1936 are pretty quick to tally the whole list.  (see Yale University and UCB websites).

Clearly football is unique because the NCAA has team titles for every other level of college sports.  Still chaos is clearly the norm.  American football is closing in on 150 years of existence now.  Yet the tally of claims to a national championship exceeds 300!!!  Insanity.  Of that total, evidently 242 are claimed actively by schools right now.  Which I can believe because my spot check of Princeton, Yale and UCB both included almost every possible championship claim.

FWIW - Princeton has 28 claims which is apparently tops.  Yale is #2.  No one else claims anything close to those two.  Though, as you might guess, many schools claim national championships for the same years as Princeton and Yale.

Oddly, Stanford is rather unique in not claiming pre-FDR results. FWIW - Stanford's titles are not exactly clear cut.
Stanford "won" in 1926, but Alabama, Lafayette, Michigan and Navy each can claim that year too.
Stanford "won" in 1940, but Minnesota was the AP champ, and Tennessee was tops in other polls.

Re: The Stanford National Championship Tree - 81alum - 06-27-2013

I was surprised by two thing on the list--men's tennis has not won a title since 2000?  I have not followed it, obviously, but just assumed we had remained as dominate as we were in my undergraduate years (McEnroe was in my class.)  Has something happened to our program over the last 10 years?

And baseball?  Stanford has had so many superb baseball teams and no championship since 1988?  That is almost like women's basketball, I guess, where year after year of superb play never quite results in another championship.

Re: The Stanford National Championship Tree - pincemob - 06-27-2013

I am no expert on 1940s college football history but a couple of things strike me about that year, after 15 minutes of research.  One is that the AP poll appears to have been based on regular season only.  Minnesota at 8-0 did not play in a bowl game, whereas we beat Nebraska 21-13 in the Rose Bowl to get to 10-0.  The second is that I would guess the mix of east vs. west coast voters was pretty slanted (the California population was only 7 million in 1940 and there were probably a lot fewer writers).  The third is that we were probably pretty low in the preseason poll having been 1-7-1 the prior year under "Tiny Thornhill", in a year where we scored 54 points all year.  Clark Shaughnessy deserves credit for a pretty good turnaround!

Incidentally, Nebraska and Minnesota played in the first game of 1940.  Minnesota won 13-7.  So we have the edge on point differential.  I think the computers would have crowned us. 

Re: The Stanford National Championship Tree - Farm93 - 06-27-2013

(06-27-2013, 01:38 PM)norcalcard link Wrote:Incidentally, Nebraska and Minnesota played in the first game of 1940.  Minnesota won 13-7.  So we have the edge on point differential.  I think the computers would have crowned us.
Chaos and uncertainty 70+ years later.  FWIW - I think most schools would include that season in their national championship tally.

Re: The Stanford National Championship Tree - FarmBoy - 06-27-2013

Quote:I think the computers would have crowned us.

Which raises the question, how many punch cards would it take to generate Sagarin's RPI in 1940 and how many months to assemble to program to run it?

Re: The Stanford National Championship Tree - Farm93 - 06-27-2013

(06-27-2013, 01:51 PM)FarmBoy link Wrote:
Quote:I think the computers would have crowned us.

Which raises the question, how many punch cards would it take to generate Sagarin's RPI in 1940 and how many months to assemble to program to run it?
The best computers and programmers for that task were busy breaking enigma codes.  Probably a bit more important to stop THAT chaos.

Re: The Stanford National Championship Tree - stupac2 - 06-27-2013

(06-27-2013, 05:06 PM)Publius link Wrote:Anybody else have good "How the hell did I get into Stanford?" moments?
Pretty much every time I studied with other physics students. I had to be the least adept of my entire class, or it sure seemed that way.

Of course, IHUM gave me a good number of "how the hell did THEY get into Stanford?" moments.

Re: The Stanford National Championship Tree - Nan3cy - 06-28-2013

(06-28-2013, 08:24 AM)garvin link Wrote:In the early 1970s, when I was a student, Stanford-wide graduation requirements were pretty lax. Many of the individual departments had extensive and exacting course requirements, but the only general ones laid down by the University were two quarters of freshman English (with an exemption for anybody scoring 700 or more on the SAT English achievement test) and three courses each in the math/science, humanities and social science divisions.

Didn't everyone have to take CIV (or Western Civ, or IHUM, or whatever it might have been called at that time)?

Re: The Stanford National Championship Tree - terry - 07-01-2013

(06-26-2013, 03:27 PM)Hank 91 link Wrote:On SportsCenter last night they had a graphic listing UCLA's 109 national championships, and they gave it a catchy name -- the UCLA Pyramid of Success, an appropriate nod to John Wooden. Anyway, I was wondering how our 104 championships broke down. Here it is by number and with the last championship year in parenthesis.

17 -- Women's tennis (2013)
17 -- Men's tennis (2000)
10 -- Men's water polo (2003)
8 -- Men's swimming (1998)
7 -- Men's golf (2007)
7 -- Women's swimming (1998)
6 -- Women's volleyball (2005)
5 -- Men's gymnastics (2011)
5 -- Women's cross country (2008)
4 -- Men's cross country (2004)
4 -- Men's track and field (2000)
3 -- Women's water polo (2012)
2 -- Men's volleyball (2010)
2 -- Women's basketball (1992)
2 -- Baseball (1988)
1 -- Women's soccer (2012)
1 -- Women's lightweight rowing (2010)
1 -- Women's rowing (2009)
1 -- Men's basketball (1942)
1 -- Football (1926)

Source: http://champions.stanford.edu/history/stanfords-national-championships/

Stanford does have 104 NCAA team championships, but this list is not quite correct. Women's swimming and men's golf each has 8 NCAA championships, not 7. The NCAA does not sponsor championships in women's lightweight rowing and football, so those championships should not be on this list. [Edit -- Oops, I see now that Farm93 already made this point.]

If we want to count all team championships, not just NCAA championships, I believe Stanford has an additional 19 non-NCAA championships (including two this year), for an overall total of 123:

7 - Synchronized swimming
4 - Women's lightweight rowing
2 - Men's basketball (before the NCAA tournament started)
1 - Men's tennis (before the NCAA tournament started)
1 - Men's water polo (before the NCAA tournament started)
1 - Women's swimming (AIAW)
1 - Women's tennis (AIAW)
1 - Co-ed sailing
1 - Football (1926)

Stanford claims a football championship for 1926 because it won the Rissman Trophy. The Rissman Trophy was the first widely publicized and accepted football national championship award. It was based on the Dickinson System, a mathematical computation system developed by a professor at the University of Illinois. The Rissman Trophy was first awarded in 1926. Claims of national championships before 1926 are based on retroactive applications of one system or another. Quite a few of the claims of national championships after 1926 also are based on retroactive applications of various systems. For example, the National Championship Foundation started naming champions in the 1980s, but also went back and named champions retroactively for previous seasons.

Stanford does not claim the 1940 football championship for the reason described by Garvin. The AP poll became the preferred method for declaring a football champion in 1936, and Stanford was not the AP champion in 1940. However, we could possibly claim the 1940 championship because we were # 1 in the Helms, Billingsley, and Poling rankings. (See our 2012 football media guide, page 141.) Maybe we should claim 1940 also.