Tennessee defends the belt, 28–0, on the road at Chattanooga.
AP poll, week 5: Tennessee No. 1 at Chattanooga unranked · No. 1 that week: Tennessee. The belt vs. the polls →
Where this game sits in the lineage
Tennessee came in 371 days into reign #83, which began with a win over Auburn, with 10 defenses already behind it; this was its 11th defense. Tennessee went on to defend it 7 more times before USC took it on January 1, 1940, 450 days after the reign began.
For Chattanooga this was its 2nd 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 2nd of 3 belt games between the two; going in, Tennessee led the belt series 1–0; all-time Tennessee leads 3–0. Every meeting →
About this game
Tennessee traveled to Chattanooga on October 14, 1939, as the belt's defending champion. Chattanooga won the game 28-0, but Tennessee retained 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 23160) · This game in the downloadable dataset