Tennessee defends the belt, 45–0, at home over Chattanooga.
AP poll, week 7: Chattanooga unranked at Tennessee No. 4 · No. 1 that week: Notre Dame. The belt vs. the polls →
Where this game sits in the lineage
Tennessee came in 28 days into reign #83, which began with a win over Auburn, with 3 defenses already behind it; this was its 4th defense. Tennessee went on to defend it 14 more times before USC took it on January 1, 1940, 450 days after the reign began.
For Chattanooga this was its first shot at the belt; it had never held the belt. It still hasn’t: 8 attempts in all, every one of them a loss or a tie.
It was the first of 3 meetings between the two with the belt on the line; all-time Tennessee leads 3–0. Every meeting →
About this game
Tennessee defended the College Football Belt on November 5, 1938, defeating visiting Chattanooga 45-0 in a regular season matchup. With the victory, Tennessee retained possession of the belt.
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 22730) · This game in the downloadable dataset