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The 100-day club
Only 131 of the belt’s 328 reigns have lasted 100 days. Here is who is in the club, who got there without an offseason to lean on, and how close the current reign is.
131of 328 reigns have reached 100 days
No. 1 131 of 328 reigns have reached 100 days
The typical reign is short: the median is 35 days, which is a few Saturdays. Only 131 reigns (40%) have lasted 100 days, 39 have lasted a full year, and 5 have reached 1,000 days. Most of the club got there the easy way — a reign that survives into December carries the belt through the offseason for free, and the calendar does the rest.
No. 2 Princeton has the most: 9
Membership by program: Princeton (9), Yale (7), USC (7), Alabama (7), Harvard (5), and Auburn (5). That list is a decent proxy for sustained quality — a program has to win the belt and hold it into the winter, or defend it a dozen times, to get on it.
No. 3 The hard way: 100 days inside one season
Exactly one reign has reached 100 days without an offseason to help — won in the fall and defended into the bowl season. It is Ohio State’s 2006 reign: 122 days and 10 defenses, September 9, 2006 to January 9, 2007.
No. 4 Where the current reign stands
Notre Dame is at 291 days, the 101st-longest reign in belt history, already a member.
What it means
The belt’s clock never stops, so the club is really two clubs: programs that carried it through an offseason, and the much smaller group that ran a hundred days of Saturdays without losing. The second list is the one to be impressed by.
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