[Farm93]

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.

[Farm93]

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.