Why Minnesota will be part of college football’s national championship picture this fall

9-11 minutes 8/11/2023
The Gophers football program will be included in the NCAA national championship conversation this season.
Wait, what?
While the 2023 Gophers team will be unranked in top 25 preseason polls and is picked to finish third in the Big Ten West Division, heavy title favorite Georgia is gunning for what the U did nearly 90 years ago.
The Bulldogs are seeking three straight national championships — a feat that has proven unattainable for any school since the Gophers pulled it off in 1934-1936.
Georgia head coach Kirby Smart has been providing history lessons on dynasties to his current players, but not with this example.
“We’ve certainly looked at some three-peat scenarios of teams like the (Chicago) Bulls and different sports teams that they might actually know about,” Smart said at SEC Media Days in July. “No offense to the Minnesota 1935 team, but I don’t know if it’s going to resonate with my audience.”
When the Crimson Tide attempted a three-peat a second time, after winning it all in 2011 and ’12, no connection was drawn to Minnesota.
But this time around, articles from national outlets will draw a through line between top-ranked Georgia and yesteryear Minnesota, and ESPN is looking to the U for possible help in preparing graphics to show during TV broadcasts this season.
“It’s something for Gopher fans to use to root against Georgia,” said Rick Moore, author of “University of Minnesota Football Vault: The History of the Golden Gophers.”
College football was coming into its own in the 1930s on regional and national levels. The Gophers-Hawkeyes rivalry game in 1935 was the first with Floyd of Rosedale on the line. The Heisman Trophy was born in 1935, and the Associated Press poll first attempted to clear up a jumbled system in 1936.
Before the AP poll, a hodgepodge of different math systems — including Dickinson, Helms, Billingsley, Brand, Football Research and National Championship Foundation, Litkenhous, Poling and Sagarin — produced national champions, meaning split titles were even more prevalent into the mid-30s than the subsequent eras leading up to the Bowl Championship Series in late 1990s and College Football Playoff starting in 2014.
Each of the Gophers’ championships came with others given a claim — including Alabama in 1934; and Southern Methodist, Texas Christian and Princeton in 1935. In the first AP poll, No. 1 Minnesota received 25 first-place votes and runner-up Louisiana State had nine. And a few of the various math systems somehow deemed Pittsburgh champions.
The era was filled with oddities. From 1934-36, a group of 250 newspaper sports editors voted for the national champion and the winner then received the Toledo Cup, which was bizarrely named after the Toledo (Ohio) Scale Company.
Given the U’s three-peat, there is a worn 30-inch silver trophy sitting in a glass case at the U’s Gibson-Nagurski Athletic Center. It’s one of a kind. The neighboring case currently holds the 2015 Quick Lane Bowl trophy. (The Gophers are planning to reconfigure the set-up of its keepsakes.)
Tucked away in another trophy case inside the Larson Football Performance Center is the 1935 national championship trophy. The football on it looks more like a rugby ball and the football player atop the ball looks a lot like the figure on the Heisman Trophy. The inscription reads, “Minnesota National Football Champion, 1935, Presented by National Italian American Civic League.”
The oddities of the era carried over to the Gopher teams. One U player was deemed the last in the conference to not wear a helmet. In one key game in 1934, the U punted on early downs, a defensive strategy that ended up helping them win. And in 1936, the team survived a hotel fire in Montana.
Across those three seasons, Minnesota’s combined record was 23-1 and they outscored opponents by a total of 667 to 116, for an average per-game score of 28-5.
“Those first three championships in the ‘30s were truly the golden years for the Gophers,” Moore said in an interview with the Pioneer Press.
Here’s a brief look back at college football’s last three-peat:
1934
Record: 8-0 overall, 5-0 Western Conference
Scoring margin: Minnesota 270, opponents 38
Head coach Bernie Bierman’s third season at the helm did not come with grand expectations. His first two teams at Minnesota went 5-3 in 1932 and 4-0-4 in 1933.
Minnesota blew out North Dakota State and shut out Nebraska in the opening two weeks before traveling to Pittsburgh to play in front of 65,000 fans in late October. The Panthers, who played in the Rose Bowl in 1932, took a 7-0 lead in the first half.
Bierman’s offense opted to punt on first and second downs in the first half, an odd tactic aimed at having the Gophers defense eventually wear down Pittsburgh’s offense.
The Gophers’ rested, run-heavy, single-wing offense broke through in the second half and used a trick play, a halfback pass, to score the winning touchdown.
A man blowing a whistle
Bernie Bierman, Minnesota Gophers football coach on Oct. 23, 1936. (Pioneer Press Archive)
In early November, the Gophers ended a 2-18-2 skid against Michigan with a 34-0 blowout of the Wolverines at the now-demolished Memorial Stadium. Former Michigan coach Fielding Yost told a reporter postgame that “he couldn’t believe a team could have as much power as the Gophers showed,” Moore wrote in “Vault.”
The Gophers had four All-Americans, including Francis “Pug” Lund (a future College Football hall of famer from Rice Lake, Wis.), Frank “Butch” Larson, Bob Tenner and Bill Bevan, who was deemed the last player in the conference to take the field without headgear.
“He never hit his stride until he was hit in the face,” Bierman said of Bevan.
1935
Record: 8-0, 5-0
Scoring margin: Minnesota 194, opponents 46
The Gophers were expected to be rebuilding, not repeating, that autumn.
A handful of stars were gone to graduation; four players who had transferred from Oregon were lost after the Big Ten changed its transfer rule; and one key halfback, Julie Alphonse, was ruled academically ineligible.
The U didn’t dominate North Dakota State and Nebraska in its first two games like it did in 1934, needing a goal-line stand against the Cornhuskers. But the Gophers still won.
The final nonconference game was against Tulane, which in 1934 went 10-1 in the SEC and won the Sugar Bowl. Against the Green Wave, Gophers captain and quarterback Glenn Seidel broke his collarbone and was lost for the rest of the season.
Bierman, induced into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1955, was able to develop backups and relied on linemen, primarily tackles Ed Widseth of Crookston and Dick Smith of Rockford, Ill., and guard Charles Wilkinson of Minneapolis. Widseth and Wilkinson were later inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame, as well.
The Gophers won five straight conference games, including 13-6 on the road at Iowa. In 1934, the Gophers were accused of targeting Hawkeyes running back Ozzie Simmons, “The Ebony Eel,” a claim made on racial grounds.
So for that fall’s rivalry game, the Minnesota and Iowa governors set up bet of a live pig to be given from the losing state to the winning one. The Floyd of Rosedale trophy game was born.
1936
Record: 7-1, 4-1
Scoring margin: Minnesota 203, opponents 32
The strength of the Gophers’ schedule grew in 1936, with Washington and Texas on the slate.
For the season opener, the U embarked on a four-day train trip to the Seattle, with two practices scheduled in Miles City, Mont., and Spokane, Wash.
The team was asleep at the Florence Hotel in Missoula, Mont., when St. Paul Daily News Editor Ed Shave saw a fire had started at approximately 3 a.m. at an adjacent drug store. He then alerted the hotel’s desk clerk, Moore wrote in “Vault.”
As the hotel was destroyed, the team evacuated and no one was injured. They spent the night back on the train.
As the legend of the fire grew, this tale was attached to Bierman, via writer James Quirk: “Flames were shooting all around and some (players) couldn’t decide what to do. ‘Shall we jump for it or try the fire escape?’ one of them yelled. Throughout the smoke, the answer came back: ‘If you are subs, go ahead and jump; regulars, use the fire escape!’ ”
Brimstone was also avoided against the Huskies. The Gophers recovered a fumble and scored a late touchdown in a 14-7 victory.
The Gophers shut out Nebraska, Michigan and Purdue in the next three weeks and were ranked No. 1 before a big game against No. 3 Northwestern in late October. Amid rainy, windy and muddy conditions, the Gophers’ 28-game unbeaten streak ended in a 6-0 loss to the Wildcats.
Minnesota bounced back to blowout Iowa, Texas and Wisconsin, while new No. 1 Northwestern lost its season finale to No. 11 Notre Dame, 26-6. It was the earliest example in the poll era of how costly it can be for a team to lose at the end of the season.
Northwestern (6-0) had won conference title but tumbled down the poll; Minnesota benefitted from its finish to the season and was voted national champion.
“For Minnesota to pull that off for three years in a row,” Moore said, “that was fabulous.”