From the Sports Desk

For their college football preview, most blogs choose a picture of their favorite team or maybe that team's logo. Here at WDW, the Sports Desk does things a little differently. Instead of a photograph of a quarterback throwing a pass or some hype meme, we present a nearly indecipherable chart showing the status of college football's imaginary Championship Belts.

For the uninformed, the belts don't actually exist and nearly no one else seems to track them, but the Sports Desk likes to imagine that each year, a Championship Belt is minted for that year's national champ.  Like in boxing, the champion holds the belt until the team is beaten by someone else, and then the winner takes the belt.

For example, on January 13, 2015, Ohio State beat Oregon, 42-20, to win the National Championship for the 2014 season. By Belt Theory, Ohio State thereby came to own the 2014 National Championship Belt. The Buckeyes defended the belt for the first 10 games of the 2015 season, but then lost to Michigan State, 17-14, on November 21, 2015. As a result, the Spartans took their belt away, and held it for the next two games, until losing to Alabama, 38-0, in the Cotton Bowl.         

Not quite two weeks later, Alabama won the 2015 National Championship Game, beating Clemson, 45-40, on January 11, 2016. Therefore, a new Championship Belt was crafted for Alabama, and they unified their new belt with the 2014 National Championship Belt, formerly owned by Ohio State.

Alabama kept the unified belts by going undefeated through the 2016 season until losing to Clemson in the 2016 National Championship Game. As a result, Clemson took the unified 2014 and 2015 belts away from Alabama and unified them with their newly crafted 2016 National Championship Belt.

There's two ways of looking at the Championship Belts. One is the way we've been discussing, with a new belt crafted each year for that year's National Champion. But another way of looking at it is to imagine that there's only one true belt, which was awarded to the winner of the very first college football game ever played, and it's that belt that gets taken away and passed around by successive winners. 

Folks with more patience and research skills than I have traced the One True Belt back to the winner of the November 6, 1869 Rutgers-Princeton game.  Rutgers won, 6-4, and the game probably more resembled what we would call "soccer" today than American football (hence the unusual score). For example, the game was played with a round ball and players weren't allowed to use their hands. Nevertheless, it's still considered the first college football game, but Rutgers didn't hold onto the Championship Belt for long, losing to Princeton, 8-0, the next weekend.

In any event, the One True Belt was won and lost by a number of successive teams over the next century-and-a-half, and on October 22, 2016, Albama won it away from Texas A&M.  Since at that time, Alabama was holding Ohio State's former 2014 Championship Belt and their own 2015 belt, the Crimson Tide unified the One True Belt with the two Championship Belts.

So the belt that Clemson won away from Alabama in the 2016 National Championship Game was not only the unified 2014 and 2015 Championship Belts, but also the Holy, Moley Guacamole One True Belt (blessed be its name).

The chart above tracks the National Championship belts each year of the College Football Playoff system.  Unification events, when one team combines their newly crafted Championship Belt with the other belts, are indicated by the blue arrows. The track of the Holy Moley, Guacamole One True Belt (blessed be its name) is shown in yellow.  

At present, the Washington Huskies hold the unified Championship Belts and the HMGOTB, and the Georgia Bulldogs hold their own 2021 and 2022 Championship Belts. Being a Georgia fan, I would love to see the Bulldogs unify their belts with the other Championship Belts and the HMGOTB. But the teams aren't currently scheduled to play each other, although there's an outside chance that may happen in the 2023 Playoffs.  More likely, Washington will lose the game to some other team, and then a third team will take the belts away from them, and so on and so forth until the belt holder faces Georgia.

So the 2023 season starts today (Day of the North Sea according to the Universal Solar Calendar), oddly enough in Dublin, Ireland, where the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame will play the Midshipmen of the U.S. Naval Academy. Notre Dame is favored to win by over 20 points, but I'll be cheering for Navy because I like underdogs and I hate fucking Notre Dame. Don't get me started on the many reasons why.

The Georgia Bulldogs don't begin their season until next weekend.  We Georgia fans are hoping for a three-peat championship - a third belt to unify with the previous two, and hopefully with all the other belts, including the Holy, Moley etc.