The Missouri Tigers have a new piece of championship validation, and it came from an unlikely place: the U.S. Senate.
During a meeting Thursday, Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., brought S.
Res. 833 to the floor to recognize Missouri’s claim to the 1960 college football national championship. The resolution passed by unanimous consent.
“More than six decades later, the 1960 Tigers still embody the character of Missouri,” Schmitt said during the meeting. “We are a people who work.
We are a people who endure. We are people who keep our promises.
The men of that team brought home a Big Eight championship and the Orange Bowl championship game in a perfect season.”
Missouri has no immediate plans to put up a banner or flag, according to a university spokesman.
The 1960 season has long lived in the gray area between glory and argument. Missouri opened with nine straight wins and climbed to No. 1 in the AP poll after beating Oklahoma.
Then came the trip to Kansas, where the Tigers lost 23-7 and dropped to No. 5 before finishing there in the final poll released on Nov. 28.
Missouri then beat Navy in the Orange Bowl to finish 10-1. Because no poll was conducted after the postseason, Minnesota was officially recognized as college football’s No. 1 team. The Golden Gophers finished the regular season 8-2 and lost to Washington in the Rose Bowl.
Mississippi, Iowa and Washington have also been recognized by a rating system as the final top team.
Missouri’s case got a boost on Dec. 8, when the Big Eight ruled Kansas had used an ineligible player. Running back Bert Coan, who scored two touchdowns and ran for 67 yards in Kansas’ 23-7 win, began at TCU and transferred to Kansas after accepting a plane ticket to an all-star game in Chicago.
That ticket came from KU booster Bud Adams, who founded and owned the Houston Oilers, now the Tennessee Titans.
Kansas forfeited the game, though it still counts the victory in its record book. That’s part of why the Border War record remains disputed. Missouri says it leads the series 58-54-9, while Kansas lists Missouri ahead 57-55-9.
“A championship obtained by cheating is not a championship at all,” Schmitt said. “The people of Kansas have spent more than six decades trying to turn a blatant penalty into a moral victory.
But the truth is harder to bear, and facts are stubborn things. Missouri finished 11-0, reminding the conference and the American populace that cheaters never truly win.”
The rivalry stopped being an annual game when Missouri moved to the SEC in 2012, but it returned last year with a Missouri win in Columbia. The teams will meet again this season on Sept. 11, a Friday, in Lawrence, and there are no games scheduled beyond that one.
Retroactive titles are hardly unheard of in college sports. Kansas men’s basketball teams from 1922 and 1923 were later named the nation’s No. 1 teams by the Helms Athletic Foundation in 1943, and in 2016 Oklahoma State’s 1945 football team was recognized as a national champion by the American Football Coaches Association.
Now Missouri’s 1960 football team is in that same conversation.
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