Alabama's 1941 national championship was first awarded in 1954

The Houlgate System was a math rating system distributed in newspapers in the 1930s. It awarded pre-bowl national championships.

It also awarded a trophy to the pre-bowl champion, the Foreman & Clark Trophy. (Anyone know where it is today? Stanford, SMU, and LSU had it from 1934–1936.)

On December 2, 1941, five days before Pearl Harbor, in his "final selections", Deke Houlgate "placed the Golden Gophers of Minnesota in the top spot in national standings." Alabama was 3rd.



13 years later, in 1954, Houlgate published the second edition of "The Football Thesaurus". In this book, he recounted the history of football and updated his Houlgate System rankings to include Bowl Games. Scans here.

In 1954, this is all that was written about Alabama 1941's national championship:



This book, in 1954, is the first instance of Houlgate naming Alabama for 1941. It was not a contemporary selection.

Years later, in 1967, sportswriter Dan Jenkins wrote an article for Sports Illustrated in which he went back and tabulated all of the various national championship selectors over the years. Jenkins listed Houlgate as "Thesaurus," making clear the book is where he got his info, and listed the selection as Alabama (not Minnesota).

This 1967 Sports Illustrated article is almost certainly where Alabama SDI Wayne Atcheson got his info when adding national championships in the 1980s. Alabam's claims today include all 8 of the Alabama selections in the Sports Illustrated article. 1966 is not listed for Alabama in the SI article, thus it is not claimed today (despite now being in the NCAA records book).

The 1941 title was retroactively awarded in 1954.