Gophers 8-3 all time when ranked AP #1

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Illinois has never been ranked number 1. (I looked it up to be sure). Their National Championships came before the AP started ranking teams in 1936.
 

Only 142 losses by number one teams since 1936
So in 90 seasons we only average 1.58 losses by a number one team per season. A season with 3+ losses by a number one team should be seen as rare
 





Penn State was probably my biggest surprise followed by UCLA, Purdue, and Northwestern.

I thought PSU and UCLA would have more games and I didn't think Purdue and Northwestern would have any.
 

Speaking of national titles. I know we have 7 (duh, as I'm typing here in the 7 National Titles Football Forum), but what ever happened to our quest to claim more? I seem to remember a few years ago here on Gopher Hole there was talk of possibly a couple of more we could boast about. Didn't we have a special task force working on finding them? :ROFLMAO:
 



This is a really interesting graphic.

What surprised me most is Wisconsin. Wow. Badger fans all seem to think they have some sort of rich history as a program, but in reality they barely — and I mean barely — make it out of the realm of N/A irrelevance.
 

Also to note, the AP didn't rank teams for the entire season in the early years. In 1941, for example, the AP didn't rank teams the first two weeks. The rest of the season Minnesota was ranked No. 1. But the Gophers started 2-0 against Washington and Illinois before the first set of rankings.

Pretty interesting graph, though, and a lot of the usual suspects are there. With Penn State, I think one thing to note is that during some of their best seasons they weren't ranked No. 1 and always had another team in front.

The teams from 1968, 1969, 1973 and 1994 all finished undefeated. They were ranked No. 1 just once in all of those years. It was in the 1994 season for a week before flipping with Nebraska which stayed that way the rest of the year.

Even their 1986 national championship year they were behind Miami most of the season until beating them in the Fiesta Bowl.

Other schools you can tell a lot of their wins came from the same season. Syracuse at 5-0 has to be from their national title run with Ernie Davis.
 


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