So I ran across an article on SBNation and started crunching stats with a few assumptions. Here's the article: http://www.sbnation.com/ncaa-football/2012/6/13/3082700/college-football-stats-championships-defense.

The article is about how defense wins championships (shocker I know), but gives a breakdown of national titles going back to 1900 and the Polls/Source for who gave them the title. This was pretty cool and allowed me to add conference affiliation (BEFORE the latest remix of last year) in order to trend data by team and conference. A note on conference affiliation - I did not account for teams that moved in and out of conferences. I just put a team in the same conference. E.G. Georgia Tech is with the ACC so their titles in 1917 and 1928 are part of the ACC (yes I know I should account for moving around, but I didn't have that much time on my hands).

So here's my attempt to do so and feel free to validate:

Titles By Conference

Conf | Titles | '00-'20 | '21-'40 | '41-'60 | '61-'80 | '81-'00 | '01-'12

Big10 | 29 | 7 | 6 | 7 | 5 | 3 | 1

SEC | 25 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 8 | 3 | 7

Big12 | 18 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 5 | 5 | 1

Ind. | 17 | 2 | 3 | 6 | 4 | 2 | 0

Ivy | 17 | 14 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0

PAC | 15 | 1 | 4 | 1 | 5 | 2 | 2

ACC | 11 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 8 | 1

Big E | 9 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0

Next: Teams with 5 or more titles (again by same source data)

Team | Titles | '00-'20 | '21-'40 | '41-'60 | '61-'80 | '81-'00 | '01-'12

NOTR | 13 | 1 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 1 | 0

BAMA | 11 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 6 | 1 | 2

MICH | 9 | 5 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0

SCAL | 9 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 6 | 1 | 2

OHST | 7 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 3 | 0 | 1

OKLA | 7 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1

Honorable Mentions - Teams with 5 National Titles:

Miami, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas and Pittsburgh.

Of course the whole reason I did this was to show that the BCS (as flawed as it is), was one of the most significant contributions to recognizing the SEC. Yes it is still heavily based on polls/people, but once the SEC got a shot at the BCS game, we took advantage of it.

It also shows how much bunk we had to deal with in the early days. While the playoffs increase the odds that a non SEC team gets into the BCS/title game - the level of competition within the SEC and the focus on DEFENSE should give us an advantage.

I will be fun to see how this works out over the next ten years.