Tennessee defends the belt, 35–7, on the road at Auburn.
AP poll, week 3: Tennessee No. 9 at Auburn unranked · No. 1 that week: Pittsburgh. The belt vs. the polls →
Where this game sits in the lineage
Tennessee came in 308 days into reign #114, which began with a win over Vanderbilt, with no defenses yet; this was its first defense. Tennessee went on to defend it 9 more times before Baylor took it on January 1, 1957, 402 days after the reign began.
For Auburn this was its 5th shot at the belt; it had held the belt 3 times before.
It was the 3rd of 4 belt games between the two; going in, Tennessee led the belt series 2–0; all-time Tennessee leads 3–1. Every meeting →
About this game
Tennessee traveled to Auburn on September 29, 1956, in week 3 of the regular season as the belt's defending holder. Auburn defeated Tennessee 35-7, but Tennessee retained the belt as the defending champion.
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 33246) · This game in the downloadable dataset