Odd that those teams are absent, while 1931, 1932 and 1938 made the list.

The omission of the 1953 team and the inclusion of 1953 Maryland rankles me considerably. ND should count 1953 among its national championships. We ended the regular season No. 2 and won at Oklahoma, the team that beat No. 1 Maryland in that year's Orange Bowl.

I also was surprised that the 1972 Southern Cal team missed the list. Their overall schedule wasn't that onerous, but they were particularly dominant, beating ND 45-23 and OSU 42-17 in the Rose Bowl (pulling away in the second half of close games in both). Many USC faithful consider that team their best of all time, better than the 2004 team.

On the 1989 v 1993 arguments, I've always thought that we deserved to be honored as champions in 1993 moreso than 1989, and that we deserved to be honored as the best team in college football in 1989 moreso than 1993. That might not make sense to everyone (or anyone?), but it makes perfect sense to me.

[snark]

And I don't think it's particularly worthwhile to try to arrive at a "perfect" formula using only scores. Actually, I think the entire project is better suited for big picture comparisons than year vs. year ones. In other words, using this data to talk about the strength of Alabama's last 100 years versus Notre Dame's last 100 years as a program would be more instructive than trying to convince anyone about where those respective programs' best ten teams should fall relative to one another as individual seasons.