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:
“Thirty-five years ago, when I was a college student, people wrote letters. The businessman who read, the lawyer who traveled; the dressmaker in evening school, my unhappy mother, our expectant neighbor: all conducted an often large and varied correspondence. It was the accustomed way of ordinarily educated people to occupy the world beyond their own small and immediate lives.”
—Vivian Gornick (b. 1935)
“In football they measure forty-yard sprints. Nobody runs forty yards in basketball. Maybe you run the ninety-four feet of the court; then you stop, not on a dime, but on Miss Liberty’s torch. In football you run over somebody’s face.”
—Donald Hall (b. 1928)
“As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)