The 1931 college football season saw the USC Trojans win the Knute Rockne Memorial Trophy as national champion under the Dickinson system. Rockne, who had coached Notre Dame to a championship in 1930, had been killed in a plane crash on March 31, 1931. For the first time, the champion under the Dickinson system also played in a postseason game. The Rose Bowl, promoted as an unofficial championship matchup between the best teams of East and West, matched USC and Tulane, #1 and #2 in the Dickinson ratings. USC won, 21-12. Also in 1931 Parke Davis through research, and recognized by the NCAA, declared that Purdue and Pittsburgh were National Champions. Major conferences that existed in 1931 were the Western Conference (today's Big Ten), the Pacific Coast Conference (now the Pac-10), the Big Six (forerunner of the Big 12), the Southwest Conference, and the Southern Conference (whose members later formed the SEC and the ACC). At season's end, the Rissman Trophy was awarded to the team that finished first in the "Dickinson ratings", which considered strength of schedule, in that a win, loss or tie against a "strong" opponent was worth more than one against a lesser team, and the results were averaged.
Read more about 1931 College Football Season: September, October, November, December, Conference Standings, Conference Leaders, Dickinson System, Final Dickinson Rankings, 1932 Rose Bowl
Famous quotes containing the words college, football and/or season:
“I tell you, you’re ruining that boy. You’re ruining him. Why can’t you do as much for me?”
—S.J. Perelman, U.S. screenwriter, Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, and Norman Z. McLeod. Groucho Marx, Horsefeathers, a wisecrack made as Huxley College president to Connie, the college widow (Thelma Todd)
“People stress the violence. That’s the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there’s a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There’s a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies stewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there’s a satisfaction to the game that can’t be duplicated. There’s a harmony.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)
“Let us have a good many maples and hickories and scarlet oaks, then, I say. Blaze away! Shall that dirty roll of bunting in the gun-house be all the colors a village can display? A village is not complete, unless it have these trees to mark the season in it. They are important, like the town clock. A village that has them not will not be found to work well. It has a screw loose, an essential part is wanting.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)