How and why Missouri is claiming a college football title 66 years later

THE LEGISLATIVE AGENDA for Aug. 6, 2026, contained issues of varying national relevance: Public health research, obscure national holidays, funding to support the fight against tick-borne illnesses, best practices for non-governmental commercial activity in outer space and … Missouri’s 1960 football team.

That’s because Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-MO, 51, is a college football fan. Elected in 2023, the former Missouri attorney general has taken an interest in college athletics during his first term in the U.S. Senate, educating himself on media rights and NIL, forging relationships with Missouri coach Eli Drinkwitz and athletic director Laird Veatch and, this spring, co-sponsoring the bipartisan Protect College Sports Act alongside Sens. Maria Cantwell, Chris Coons and Ted Cruz.

In August, Schmitt took up another cause. Standing behind a lectern on the senate floor, he introduced S. Res. 833, a resolution recognizing Missouri’s 1960 football team and its claim to the 1960 national championship. Before 74 senators voted Tuesday to begin consideration of the Protect College Sports Act, the upper house of the legislative branch first dipped its toes into one of college football’s most pervasive traditions: the retroactively “claimed” national title.

“I love college football. I love SEC football. I love Mizzou football,” Schmitt told ESPN this week. “I just kind of approached this as a fan and like, ‘Well, hey, listen, if other teams have laid claim to this, why wouldn’t Missouri?’ I think they have the most credible claim of all of them.”

It’s how, by way of unanimous consent from the U.S. Senate, the 1960 Tigers became national champions last month — nearly 66 years after the fact. On Saturday, during halftime of Missouri’s Week 3 visit from Troy (7 p.m. ET, SEC+), the school will honor the remaining members of the team as national champions for the first time.

“Kids, grandkids, great-grandkids — I’ve got 25 people coming with me,” said Carl Crawford, a sophomore halfback in the fall of 1960. “It’s nice to be remembered again.”

The NCAA record book recognizes 32 split champions since 1869. But the governing body has never held actual administrative authority over the sport’s postseason, leaving schools and organizations with plenty of latitude to claim championships of their own, some more credible than others.

Not long after Georgia won its first national championship in 1980, coach Vince Dooley learned that the College Football Hall of Fame also listed a Bulldogs national title in 1942. So, the program retroactively claimed that one, as well. In 2016, the Football Writers Association of America awarded the 1945 championship to Oklahoma State (then Oklahoma A&M); UCF famously claimed a title a year later when the undefeated Knights were left out of the College Football Playoff. No program boasts more unrecognized national championships than Auburn, which added a whopping seven additional titles to its résumé in August 2025.

Like many of the other recent entrants into the sport’s long and strange history of contested national champions, the 1960 Tigers have a compelling case. It includes one of the most controversial chapters in Missouri’s bitter rivalry with Kansas, John F. Kennedy and an Orange Bowl victory over No. 4 Navy.

For their part, Missouri officials emphasize the distinction between recognizing the 1960 Tigers as champions and the more formal title claims other programs have previously made. “I’ll be honest, my focus has been more on how we go win the next one?” Veatch, the school’s third-year athletic director, told ESPN. Fans are split on the honor, too. “I’ve wanted them to do this for decades and they’re finally, finally doing it,” said one message board poster on a Missouri fan site; another, simply: “Cringe.” Even members of the 1960 team are conflicted.

“It’s just kind of bewildering that it’s come up at this time,” Crawford said.

Nonetheless, the recognition raises some worthwhile questions: How do we measure a college football national title? Why now for Schmitt and the 1960 Tigers? And what does it mean to the handful of former players still living to be crowned champions so many years later?

“It’s kind of a bittersweet situation,” said Don Wainwright, a sophomore defensive end for the Tigers in 1960. “I don’t know if there’s more than 10 of us left, really. But we still remember each other and the hard work and the camaraderie we had together. We’re proud to be recognized.”

TIGERS COACH DAN Devine didn’t care where Missouri sat in the Associated Press, Football Writers Association of America or any other national poll. Inside the Tigers’ locker room at the Orange Bowl on Jan. 2, 1961, the legendary coach, who later led Notre Dame, was thinking about rings.

The Tigers smothered Navy halfback Joe Bellino, the 1960 Heisman Trophy winner, that afternoon. Star running back Donnie Smith torched the Midshipmen for 93 yards and a pair of touchdowns. Defensive back Norm Beal wowed the crowd of 71,218, which included Navy veteran and president-elect John F. Kennedy, with a 90-yard pick-six.

Forty-four days after a crushing defeat to Kansas, the Tigers’ 21-14 victory over the Midshipmen carried a feeling of redemption. As his players celebrated, Devine made them a promise.

“He felt like we had proven ourselves with the Navy win and told us he was going to get some championship rings made up,” recalled Wainwright. “We never did end up getting those rings.”

Few national titles in the sport’s history are more fraught than the 1960 championship. Not only because four schools — Minnesota, Ole Miss, Iowa and Washington — already hold legitimate, longstanding claims, but also because of the circumstances surrounding Missouri’s near miss.

The fall of 1960 was a season of firsts for the Tigers. In running backs Norris Stevenson and Mel West, the team featured the program’s first two Black scholarship players. In November, Missouri earned its first-ever No. 1 ranking in the AP poll and the first to win a bowl game. And, depending on which records you consult, it was the only team in program history to finish undefeated.

The game in question? A visit from Kansas on Nov. 19, 1960.

A week earlier the Tigers snapped a 15-game losing streak to Oklahoma behind 169 rushing yards and a pair of touchdowns from Stevenson. At 9-0, Missouri prepared for the rival Jayhawks, freshly minted as the No. 1 team in the AP poll. Days before the game, Wainwright and several other teammates drove to St. Louis to commission a few thousands gold pins with the word “AHAB” written on the front. “All Hawkers are Bastards,” Wainwright recalled. “They made good money on those,” said Crawford “Everybody on campus had an AHAB button.”

As Missouri stayed unbeaten and climbed the polls that fall, Crawford and his teammates weren’t fixated on a national title. More concerned with regional pride, the Tigers were focused on beating the Jayhawks and securing the Big Eight championship. Meanwhile, an eligibility saga very much befitting modern-day college football was preparing to unravel in Kansas.

A month earlier, in October, Big Eight Conference placed the Jayhawks on probation over violations related to impermissible benefits provided to running back Bert Coan, a transfer from TCU. Coan and Kansas denied the accusations vehemently, and the Jayhawks’ star rusher played on into the finale of the 10-game regular-season slate inside Missouri’s Memorial Stadium.

“There was a lot riding on it and I just think we just got too tense more than anything else,” Crawford said. “Then things started not going our way and it kept getting more and more tense.”

In Columbia, Kansas put a lid on the Tigers’ run game and rolled over Wainwright and the Missouri defense. Coan, averaging 6.7 yards per carry that fall, accounted for 67 yards and a pair of touchdowns, powering Kansas to a 23-7 upset. Three weeks later, the Jayhawks lawyered up when the Big Eight ruled Coan ineligible and stripped the Jayhawks of their final two wins and the conference title. Historically, Missouri lists its final record as 11-0, while Kansas (and the NCAA) do not recognize the forfeit, prompting a discrepancy in the Tigers’ all-time series lead between the program’s respective official records to this day (59-54-9 vs 58-56-9).

Missouri settled for an invite to the Orange Bowl — the Jayhawks, on probation, were barred from accepting — but the damage was done. “At this time, none of the polls awarded their championship after the bowl games,” Denis Crawford, historian for the College Football Hall of Fame said. “Bowl games were true exhibition contests.” AP national champion Minnesota’s Rose Bowl loss to Washington didn’t matter; neither did sluggish Sugar Bowl for Ole Miss (FWAA) or Iowa (multiple historic ranking systems) missing out on bowl season entirely.

With those results and a vindicating-Orange Bowl victory, Devine and his Tigers felt like national champions when they boarded the flight home. As for the championship rings?

None of the former players can quite remember why they never materialized today. In “Respectable Roughnecks,” Brendon Steenbergen’s definitive book on the Tigers’ 1960 season, Beal, whose Orange Bowl pick-six stunned JFK, offered his own theory.

“Everybody knew [former Missouri athletic director] Don Faurot was a world-class tight ass,” said Beal, who died in 2015. “I imagine he was never going to spring for a bunch of rings if he didn’t have to.”

PERHAPS THE BEAUTY of a college football national championship, at least in the pre-playoff era, is in the eye of the beholder?

For instance, the positive vibes of a newly claimed national title are commonly met simultaneously with a (sometimes fair) degree of cynicism from rival fans.

Sometimes, the ridicule even comes from your own people.

“To me, it reeks of ‘look at me’ desperation,” read another message board post following the announced plans to honor the 1960 Tigers. “If it really mattered, it wouldn’t have taken this long. If you’re happy about it, good for you … I’m gonna pass on this one.”

From message boards to social media to the U.S. Capitol, Schmitt and his team understood that the move might receive unanimous support. It’s among the reasons they chose not to publicly advertise the proposed resolution in advance. By and large, even Missouri officials were kept in the dark. After the resolution passed, Schmitt texted Drinkwitz, Veatch and University of Missouri system president Mun Choi with the news. Veatch broke it to the remaining 1960 Tigers and their families via Zoom.

“You got to see their reactions and the passion of those families and the people involved,” he said. “It hit home just how meaningful the history of a moment like this can be in people’s lives.”

Crawford and Wainwright will be among the small group of former players on-hand for Saturday’s ceremony, only days after Schmitt’s latest college football related business on the senate floor. The senator began his speech Tuesday’s procedural vote on the PCSA with a not-so-subtle statement: “Game time.” Schmitt told ESPN that the efforts behind Missouri’s 1960 national championship were separate from his work on the bill.

“It was important that while there were still guys alive from that team, that they were recognized for it,” Schmitt said. “You know what I mean? They were slighted in some way and we should celebrate the tradition that Mizzou football has had.”

Set to return to Memorial Field, where the 1960 Tigers were also honored before last year’s Kansas game, former players and their families hardly feel slighted. Beyond the defeat itself, neither Crawford or Wainwright is still harboring feelings of injustice surrounding the loss to Coan and the Jayhawks 66 years ago this fall, nor have they been sitting waiting for the national title recognition for the past six-and-a-half decades. “We know that Kansas cheated, but we also know we got beat on the field,” Wainwright said. “We redeemed ourselves against Navy.”

Devine, who left Missouri for the Green Bay Packers in 1970 after 13 seasons, died in 2002. Dan Devine Jr. recalled that his father still had regrets about how he prepared his team and coached against Kansas, even years later. “But that’s what coaches do,” the younger Devine said. He’ll be in the stadium on Sunday with his son, Dan Devine III, and grandson, Dan Devine IV.

“Even though not everybody is still with us, in a special way, we get to say, ‘Hey guys, you were the number one team in the country,'” Devine Jr. said. “I’m hoping to get a picture with my son and grandson. That would be a special thing for us.”

Reached by phone this week, Wainwright was tickled to learn that Missouri plans to unveil permanent signage recognizing the 1960 national champions inside Memorial Stadium on Saturday. Nearly sixty-six years later, he’s still holding out hope for the rings, too.

“I’ll tell you what,” Wainwright said. “If we could get those, I’d be real happy about that.”