Notre Dame retains the belt after a 13–13 tie with USC.
AP poll, week 6: USC unranked at Notre Dame No. 9 · No. 1 that week: Minnesota. The belt vs. the polls →
Where this game sits in the lineage
Notre Dame came in 14 days into reign #78, which began with a win over Northwestern, with no defenses yet; this was its first defense. Notre Dame went on to defend it 2 more times before Carnegie Mellon took it on October 16, 1937, 329 days after the reign began.
For USC this was its 3rd shot at the belt; it had held the belt once before. A tie leaves the belt with the holder, so it went home empty-handed.
It was the 2nd of 9 belt games between the two; going in, USC led the belt series 1–0; all-time USC leads 6–2–1. Every meeting →
About this game
Notre Dame hosted USC on December 5, 1936, in a regular season matchup that ended 13-13. Under the belt's tie rule, Notre Dame retained the championship as the holder.
Written by Claude, strictly from this site’s own record of the game — the score and what it meant for the belt. CFBD doesn’t have a box score for games this old, so nothing here is invented beyond what’s verifiably on file.
Sources Game record: College Football Data (id 21558) · This game in the downloadable dataset