The story goes that when then-Associated Press sports editor Alan Gould declared Minnesota, Princeton and TCU tri-national champions after the 1935 college football season, Gophers fans hung him in effigy.

So, yeah, national championships have always been meaningful in college football, no matter how legitimately they were determined.

There is a reason the term “mythical national championship” was used for decades, with sports writers and coaches ultimately taking their best guess about who was No. 1 at season’s end.

Championship legitimacy has been an evolution. The more the powers that be redesigned the postseason to crown a clear champion, the more emphasis everyone placed on winning it all. Sentiment varies among fans as to whether that development was a positive one.

It’s all settled on the field now with a 12-team College Football Playoff.

That’s what made Indiana’s breakthrough under coach Curt Cignetti last season so remarkable. Gone are the days when conference bowl tie-ins and convoluted formulas could play as big a role in determining a national championship as the quality of the teams.

The Hoosiers’ 16-0 season included five victories against teams that finished ranked in the final top 10 (tied for the second-most among major poll national champions) and six against top-25 teams (tied for fourth). Where exactly major college football’s first 16-0 team since the 19th century ranks among all-time champs is a separate conversation. As good as 2019 LSU? How about 1995 Nebraska or 2001 Miami? You want dominance? Check out Army’s back-to-back championship teams from 1944 and ’45.

Place Coach Cig’s Hoosiers wherever you want in the pantheon of college football’s greatest teams. But when it comes to pure legitimacy, Indiana’s national title is unimpeachable. More so than any in college football history.

Others may match it, but two years into college football’s expanded postseason era, the Hoosiers have set a standard that can’t be surpassed.

In the past, the national title existed almost off to the side in college football.

The whole idea of crowning a national champion in such a far-flung sport was raised to stoke debate, not necessarily to settle it.

“It created a storm in the Big Ten in general, and Minneapolis-St. Paul, in particular,” Gould told the AP in 1986 about his 1935 proclamation.

The next year, the AP poll was born, with Gould welcoming votes from sports writers and newspaper editors all over the country. It was far from the most structured process, but the national title was born. The United Press International, another news wire service, started polling coaches to rank the best teams in college football in 1950.

Voting was done at the end of the regular season, an acknowledgment that the few bowl games that existed were more celebratory exhibitions than games that should be factored into determining a champion. Meaningless bowls, you say? Sounds familiar.

Not until 1968 did the final AP poll factor in bowls. The coaches poll switched to post-bowl final rankings in 1974. That fact alone makes any national champion from 1936 to 1967 worthy of scrutiny.

That’s not to say all those championships are illegitimate. The Mr. Inside (Doc Blanchard) and Mr. Outside (Glenn Davis) Army teams with two Heisman Trophy winners that won consecutive titles in the mid-1940s would be impossible to argue.

Both squads went unbeaten. The 1944 team beat opponents by 52 points per game, still an NCAA record for margin of victory. An argument can be made that the 1945 team was just as dominant against better competition. Those Black Knights had an average margin of victory of 40.7 points and beat six teams (in nine games) that finished the season ranked in the AP top 20. That’s as many as Indiana did last season in 16 games with a Top 25 poll. Among national champions, only 2019 LSU (14-0), 2010 Auburn (14-0) and 2022 Georgia (15-0) beat more teams that were ranked in the final poll (seven).

Once the bowls started being factored into the national championship, it brought a new level of thoroughness to the process. Every contender had to take a final exam against a quality opponent from outside its conference or region, televised for everyone to see.

The more that teams directly controlled winning the national championship on the field, the more legitimate it became.

Now that final exam comes in three or four parts in the CFP. SEC fans can complain all they want about Indiana’s soft nonconference schedule, but when an SEC team had a chance to delegitimize IU in the Playoff, the Hoosiers stuffed Alabama into a Rose Bowl locker.

The major polls would often split on the final No. 1, which didn’t seem to really bother fans until the 1990s. It was also an acknowledgment that this whole exercise of crowning a champion was at best a noble effort but far from science.

National championships were awesome, but the stars had to align just right for a team to win one.

“As I was walking over to the stadium this morning, I thought it would be nice if we won, but we really have three national championships,” Joe Paterno told UPI in 1982 after Penn State beat Pitt in its regular-season finale to improve to 10-1.

Paterno, a longtime proponent of a playoff, already had three unbeaten seasons with no “official” titles by then.

He finally landed that first national championship by beating Georgia in the Sugar Bowl to end that ’82 season No. 1 in both major polls. He picked up another one a few years later, when the Nittany Lions upset mighty Miami in the 1987 Fiesta Bowl, and then again got snubbed with an unbeaten team in 1994 as a member of the Big Ten. Conference bowl tie-ins prevented a No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup with Nebraska.

The Bowl Alliance and other precursors to the Bowl Championship Series tried to fix the postseason problem in the early 1990s, but from 1970 through ’97 the two major polls split seven times.

That’s not to say all the champions during that period were questionable. Nebraska’s 1971 powerhouse beat the teams ranked Nos. 2, 3 and 4 in the final poll. USC’s unbeaten 1972 squad went 12-0 and beat six teams that finished in the final rankings, including crushing No. 9 Ohio State in the Rose Bowl.

Fast forward to 1995 Nebraska, which also makes a case for the greatest team in college football history. The Cornhuskers beat opponents by an average of 38 points per game and capped it by annihilating Steve Spurrier’s Fun ‘n’ Gun Florida team in the Fiesta Bowl. Want to nitpick Tom Osborne’s greatest Huskers team? Nebraska beat only three teams in the regular season that finished ranked. The Huskers beat those three top-10 teams 134-49, though, so there is that.

Indiana flashed plenty of dominance on the way to completing college football’s greatest rags-to-riches story. After crushing Alabama 38-3, the Hoosiers pummeled Oregon 56-22. The national championship game against Miami provided a more stern test.

And who could question Miami’s worthiness after the Hurricanes beat Texas A&M on the road, Ohio State and Ole Miss to earn the chance to play Indiana?

That was the problem with the BCS. It promised to deliver a season-ending game between the best two teams, but there were plenty of times when its process was questionable at best.

Miami may have assembled the greatest collection of talent on any one roster in college football history in 2001, but the BCS served the Hurricanes in the Rose Bowl a Nebraska team that had finished its regular season by giving up 62 points to Big 12 rival Colorado. Hardly the most rigorous way to cap a perfect season. Right, Oregon fans? The Ducks beat Colorado handily in the Fiesta and finished No. 2. There was probably a sense of deja vu in Eugene watching Alabama pummel Notre Dame in the 2012 BCS championship game.

There was no doubting Vince Young and Texas’ 2005 title after the Longhorns snapped USC’s 34-game winning streak to stop a Trojans three-peat.

About that USC dynasty? As good as Pete Carroll’s 2003 and ’04 champions were, both are regarded with a side-eye in SEC country. The BCS formula denied the Trojans a spot in the title game against LSU after the 2003 season, which led to college football’s last split championship — probably ever.

And in 2004, Auburn was the odd team out of a three-unbeaten-team pileup with USC and Oklahoma at the end of the regular season. The Trojans crushed the Sooners in the Orange Bowl, leaving Auburn fans to forever believe their undefeated Tigers would have done better.

Golf Digest did follow through on coach Tommy Tuberville’s pleas for some type of recognition and named Auburn its national champ. Twenty years later, Auburn decided that was good enough and followed the lead of rival Alabama by “officially” claiming a title for the 2004 team.

Raise a glass to the undefeated 2017 UCF Knights, the last self-proclaimed national champion college football will ever have.

When the four-team College Football Playoff was born in 2014, Ohio State became the first team to win it, bouncing back from an earlier loss to Virginia Tech that would have otherwise eliminated the Buckeyes in previous seasons. After Urban Meyer’s team blew through Alabama and Oregon in the postseason, Ohio State named an intersection near the Horseshoe in Columbus Undisputed Way to honor a college football first: a champion that could not be questioned.

The regular-season absolutist might disagree.

In the four-team CFP era, Joe Burrow and LSU set the bar for undeniable champions in 2019, going 15-0 with a final flourish of 142-63 against teams that finished Nos. 4 (Georgia, SEC Championship Game), 7 (Oklahoma, CFP semifinal) and 2 (Clemson, CFP championship). LSU also won a regular-season 1 vs. 2 matchup at Alabama.

Alabama’s last title team under Nick Saban went 12-0, playing only SEC teams in the regular season and statistically rating as one of the best teams in college football history. But the pandemic made a mess of that 2020 season.

Four teams were better than two as far as playoffs go, but limits were exposed by the end of the format’s 10-year run when, in 2023, Florida State was left out after an unbeaten regular season, and Georgia was denied a chance at its own three-peat when it stumbled in the SEC Championship Game against Alabama.

Of course, some look at that Michigan 2023 national title as less than legitimate for other reasons.

The Buckeyes again broke the seal on a new playoff format by winning another title that could not have happened just a year earlier in 2024. After losing twice in the regular season, Ohio State plowed through four Playoff games to the tune of 145-75. But Michigan fans will always have Wolverines 13, Buckeyes 10 in the Horseshoe.

Indiana checked all the boxes and left nothing for skeptics to nitpick.

There has never been a time in college football history when Indiana would not have been No. 1.