A companion lineage

The Losers Belt (FCS)

The real belt passes to whoever BEATS the holder. This one is its mirror image: it passes to whoever LOSES to the holder — you catch it the way you’d catch a cold, by losing to the team that currently has it. Lose again, and you keep it (you’re still the reigning worst team in the country). Win, and whoever you just beat catches it from you. It starts the same place the real belt does: Princeton, who lost the very first college football game ever played, 6–4 to Rutgers on November 6, 1869. This one is restricted to FCS programs only — both sides of every game have to be FCS, so the belt can never cross up into FBS.

How the Losers Belt works

One wrinkle: this belt can only pass by losing, so a holder that stops fielding a football team at all would hold it forever under the literal rule — and a lot of this belt’s holders are exactly the kind of small or historic programs that don’t exist anymore. When a holder goes roughly two full seasons without playing a single game, it’s treated as having discontinued football, and the belt reverts to whoever it last caught it from.