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The university's conventional count · The mechanisms printed in the Notre Dame Football file
The claim. Notre Dame claims eleven consensus national championships in football. The number is on banners, in broadcasts and in the city's own telling of itself, and it is the kind of claim that dissolves or firms depending on what a championship is counted to be.
The record. The Football file decomposed the eleven on the documents: three under the Dickinson System (1924, 1929, 1930) and eight from the wire-service era — the Associated Press and coaches' polls — across the Leahy, Parseghian, Devine and Holtz years. Other counts stand in the same record with their mechanisms named: the NCAA's own listing recognizes thirteen Notre Dame championship seasons, and twenty-two seasons carry a selection by some recognized selector. The differences are not errors; they are different counting rules — which selectors count, and whether a title must be a consensus — applied to the same seasons.
What the record leaves. The claim is supported as the school's own conventional count, with its mechanism printed: eleven consensus titles, by the Dickinson and wire-service reckonings the university uses. It is not the only defensible number, and the file prints the others beside it — thirteen on the NCAA's listing, twenty-two seasons with any selector's nod — so that the eleven is read as what it is: a convention honestly arrived at, not a count of trophies in a case.
Sources
- The Notre Dame Football file in this record — the eleven decomposed: three Dickinson System titles (1924, 1929, 1930) and eight wire-service titles; the NCAA's listing of thirteen; twenty-two any-selector seasons, each count with its mechanism.