It's one of the silliest features of maybe the silliest sport on the planet: If you were to add up all of the national championships claimed in top-level college football, you would think the sport dated back to the 1600s. Princeton claims 28 of them, Yale 27. Alabama claims 23 -- including one from a 9-2 campaign in 1941! -- and Notre Dame claims 22. That's 100 right there! And 25 other schools claim at least five!
On one hand, so be it. Fielding a football team is hard, and fielding an elite team is even harder, and if you want to hang a banner for doing that (or some approximation of it), hang the damn banner.