Black college football national championship

History

In college football's early years, HBCUs generally lacked the opportunity to compete against predominantly white schools due to segregation, which was practiced in much of the U.S. at the time—leaving HBCUs with few scheduling options other than to play themselves only and sponsor their own championships.

The first football game between HBCU schools was played on December 27, 1892. On that day Johnson C. Smith defeated Livingstone. As it was the only game played by HBCU schools that year, Johnson C. Smith's team could no doubt claim to be that season's HBCU national champions by default. However, the earliest documented claim to such a title was Livingstone's 1906 team, led by captain Benjamin Butler "Ben" Church. It is not immediately clear who designated Livingstone as the best team—or if they simply declared themselves champions.

Initially, starting in 1920, an HBCU national champion was simply declared by the Pittsburgh Courier at the end of the season. The following year others more directly associated with the schools themselves made their own attempts to crown a champ, coordinating their efforts under the auspices of the Champion Aggregation of All Conferences. The CAAC's initiative was fostered by Paul Jones, who reported the champion annually in his column in Spalding's Intercollegiate Football Guide.

The first game between an HBCU and predominantly white school occurred in the 1948 Fruit Bowl when Southern defeated San Francisco State, 30–0. Starting five years after that game, HBCUs began to gravitate over to the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics because it offered numerous athletic competition options while also openly welcoming schools of varying demographic backgrounds as members. At present most HBCUs are now members of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. However, designating an annual black national champion has remained a popular tradition, even as HBCUs have successfully challenged majority white schools for football championships for decades now, within the framework of both NCAA and NAIA competition; this includes Associated Press, United Press International, NCAA, and NAIA-sponsored titles for the 1962, 1973, 1978, 1990, 1992, and 1995 seasons, as well as runner-up finishes in 1963, 1983, 1991, 1994, and 2012.

Noteworthy team accomplishments include the sixteen championships won all-time by Tennessee State and the five won consecutively by Central State from 1986–90 (all five under coach Billy Joe). Florida A&M and Grambling State have won titles in seven different decades. Noteworthy coaching accomplishments include the nine championships won by Joe (seven at Central State and two at Florida A&M), John Merritt (one at Jackson State and eight at Tennessee State), and Eddie Robinson (all nine at Grambling). Rod Broadway has won titles at three different schools (two at North Carolina Central, one at Grambling, and one at North Carolina A&T).

Championship bowl games

Attempts have been made over the years to determine a non-mythical national champion with an actual football game contested by leading teams among HBCUs throughout the United States. The Orange Blossom Classic was often billed as such a game, but Florida A&M, as its annual host, was guaranteed a spot in this game and was not always of national championship-caliber each year that it was played between 1933 and 1978 (indeed, the Rattlers were even accused of taking advantage of a system where most selectors named their national champions before the postseason; if the Rattlers were not named champs by any selector before the postseason, they still got a second chance at the claim by winning the Orange Blossom Classic).

Contests including the Colored Championships of 1920 and 1923 (which happened to feature members of the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association, although the games were not played for the conference title), the Chocolate Bowl (1935), the Steel and Vulcan bowls (1940–41), the National Bowl (1947), and the National Football Classic (1954) were attempted periodically but without any sustained success.

The Pelican Bowl, a bowl game that tried to match up the conference champions from the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference and the Southwestern Athletic Conference, was another such example—and actually did manage to last several seasons—but even this venture failed to draw enough attendance and lasted only a few years in the 1970s. Similarly, the Heritage Bowl was played in the 1990s featuring teams from the MEAC and SWAC, but this bowl game has not been held since 1999 and was often snubbed by the conference champions in lieu of the NCAA's Division I-AA playoffs.

The two conferences began negotiations in 2010 to create a successor called the "Legacy Bowl"—not to be confused with the later exhibition game with the same name—to begin during the 2011 postseason, but it was voted down by MEAC officials. However, in 2015 the first Air Force Reserve Celebration Bowl was played, pitting the champions of both conferences. While the Celebration Bowl's trophy itself only includes the inscription "Celebration Bowl Champions," the bowl's creator (ESPN), as well as its title sponsor (Air Force Reserve) and other sponsors, have indicated that it is for the HBCU national title—as have coaches of participating teams.

In other sports

While black national champions have been crowned regularly in football for nearly a century, the concept has never fully caught on with other sports. Men's basketball briefly had a similar movement. In 1941 Southern, coached by the famed football coach Ace Mumford, defeated North Carolina Central, 48–42, in the National Invitational Intercollegiate Basketball Tournament. This tournament was held because the National Invitational Tournament would not invite majority black schools at the time. NCCU was also named national champions that same year by the Associated Negro Press. In late 1947 National Championships, Inc. announced that they would soon begin hosting a postseason basketball tournament for HBCUs. Jet magazine later sponsored an HBCU basketball poll. In much more recent years, various websites have named champions for basketball and baseball. BlackCollegeBaseball.com, for example, has named several black national champions for baseball, including North Carolina A&T and Southern jointly in 2005 and Prairie View A&M in 2006. Bethune-Cookman also defeated Alcorn State in a special postseason series in 2011.

Selectors

Not all black national championships are the same. Early poll rankings were for the best overall HBCU, while bowl games often matched champions of only two specific HBCU conferences. However, the NCAA and NAIA later split into divisions, and newer selectors have tended to rank HBCU members by division only (e.g., the Football Championship Subdivision level of NCAA Division I, NCAA Division II).

Notes: *—the Pelican Bowl (played 1972 and 1974–75) and Heritage Bowl (played 1991–99) were intended as black national championship games matching the outright champions or top-seeded co-champions of the MEAC and SWAC conferences, but in practice the top seeds often declined their automatic bids to participate in the NCAA playoffs instead—only the 1972, 1975, and 1994 games matched the top seeds of both conferences as originally intended, although the Pelican Bowl is known to have been promoted as a black national championship game all three seasons; **—the Steel Bowl/Vulcan Bowl (played after the 1940–48 and 1951 seasons) is known to have been promoted as a black national championship game after the 1940 and 1941 seasons