Back at the start of the decade in 2020, the InsideNU community came together to rank the program’s greatest teams. With a new era proclaimed, a $35 million donation and a stadium near completion, along with the still 24 days until the 2026 season, we figure there is no better time than to do it again.
This is part one of a three-part series, with four teams in each batch. Each article will have general write-ups for the teams involved to help aid your decisions, and the results of each poll across
our social media pages will determine the seeding for our final bracket.
We begin with the teams that predate even the NU Lakefill in 1903, 1930, 1931 and 1936.
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1903: The First of Many “What-Ifs”
Record: 10-1-3, Western Conference co-champion, head coach Walter McCornack (1st season)
This is the earliest genuinely great Northwestern team on record, and it predates the AP poll, bowl games and most modern conference record-keeping. In his first season replacing Charles Hollister, McCornack led Northwestern to a 10-1-3 record, tying for the program’s first Western Conference (the original name for the Big Ten) championship. The Wildcats shut out eight opponents and outscored the field 229 to 67 across the season.
It was simply a completely different world though, as NU’s schedule included games against multiple high school teams, a military fort and even a 5-0 official matchup against Northwestern alumni. A wins a win though, right?
The Wildcats went undefeated through their first eleven games, including scoreless ties against both UChicago and Notre Dame, two of the era’s most important programs. The only loss came in the season finale against the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, one of the most talented teams in the country at the time. In a game remembered more for featuring “blinding snow,” the men in purple would leave wanting to forget, getting shutout 28-0. Losing to them at the very end of an otherwise spotless season was, in context, not a discrediting result.
The following year, 1904, Northwestern brought in Carlisle great Jimmy Johnson after he earned All-American honors partially as a result of taking down NU. As a graduate student, he would help the team post eight shutout wins of their own.
Unfortunately, this entire era ended abruptly, which limits its staying power. What might’ve been a dynasty was simply a one-off, and since they didn’t go undefeated, this team is often forgotten in the history books. After the 1905 season, a special investigative committee studying the brutality of early football recommended changes, and Northwestern’s trustees opted to suspend the sport entirely. The Wildcats, back then referred to as “the Methodists” or simply as “the Purple,” did not field a varsity team in 1906 or 1907, a reminder of how genuinely dangerous and unregulated the early game was.
Big happening: The undefeated-until-the-finale near miss against Carlisle is the first “what if” in program history, decades before the more famous 1931 and 1995 near misses.
1930: The Foundation Year Before The Storm
Record: 7-1, Big Ten co-champion (with Michigan), head coach Dick Hanley
Often overshadowed by 1931 because it came first and didn’t have the same dramatic finish, 1930 was arguably the more statistically dominant of Hanley’s two great teams. Northwestern went 7-1, tied Michigan for the Big Ten title and outscored opponents by a combined 182 to 36 across the season, an average margin of well over 15 points per game against a major-conference schedule.
There’s not much to go off beyond statistics, as there simply is much more media available surrounding the succeeding team the year after. That being said, unlike in 2025, the Wildcats were able to “repel the invasion of the Tulane Green Wave” by beating them in their season opener 14-0.
Captain Henry Bruder anchored the team that was at the beginning of a two-year stretch that represented Northwestern’s first sustained run of true national relevance, setting the stage directly for the near-miss of 1931. Dyche Stadium (built in 1926) was still a fairly new venue at this point, and the 1930 season helped establish it as a place opposing Big Ten programs had to take seriously.
Big happening: The 182-36 scoring differential remains one of the most dominant statistical seasons in school history, conference play included.
1931: The National Title That Slipped Away
Record: 7-1-1, Big Ten co-champion (three-way tie with Purdue and Michigan), head coach Dick Hanley
This is the single most tantalizing “what if” season in Northwestern history. The Wildcats entered the final week of the season undefeated at 7-0-1, with their only blemish a scoreless tie against Notre Dame at Soldier Field in front of 70,000 fans. A win or tie in the finale against Purdue would very likely have sent Northwestern to the Rose Bowl to play USC, with a share of the national championship plausibly on the line, since the AP poll didn’t yet exist to formally crown anyone.
Instead, in what had been arranged as an impromptu, non-scheduled postseason charity game in Chicago that ended up functioning as the de facto Big Ten championship, Purdue won 7-0. Northwestern drove the ball into scoring range late, but a final incomplete pass into the end zone resulted in a touchback under the rules of the era, and Purdue ran out the clock. The loss meant Northwestern settled for only a share of the conference title in a three-way tie with Purdue and Michigan, with no Rose Bowl bid and no shot at the national championship.
Halfback Ernest “Pug” Rentner was the engine of the team and a consensus first-team All-American, later a College Football Hall of Fame inductee. He was joined on the All-America team by two Northwestern tackles, Jack Riley and Dallas Marvil, meaning the Wildcats put three players on the consensus All-America squad in a single season, a genuinely extraordinary total for any program in any era. Riley was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1988, Rentner in 1979.
Historical rankings of the 1931 national championship race have specifically noted that Northwestern’s mythical national title case ended precisely with that Purdue loss. Had they won or tied, their profile, an undefeated record against a solid schedule with a tie against a very good Notre Dame team, would have been strong enough to be part of the national title conversation.
Big happening: The Purdue game was not originally on the schedule as a championship decider. It was arranged as a charity exhibition and turned into the biggest game in school history up to that point, potentially ever, essentially by accident.
1936: The Stint as the Number One Team in the Country
Record: 7-1 (6-0 Big Ten), Big Ten champion (outright), final AP ranking No. 7, head coach Lynn “Pappy” Waldorf
A note on the record: Northwestern was not the top team in the very first AP poll, contrary to popular belief. That poll, on Oct. 20, 1936, had Minnesota at No. 1. What actually happened is arguably a better story.
On Oct. 31, 1936, in a Friday night game at Evanston, unbeaten Northwestern hosted unbeaten and top-ranked Minnesota, the two-time defending national champion that hadn’t lost a game in more than three years. The game was scoreless into the fourth quarter until Northwestern’s line “ripped a gaping hole in the Gophers’ forward wall,” and Steve Toth scored the only touchdown of the day. Northwestern held on, 6-0, handing Minnesota its only loss of the season.
On the strength of that win, the AP poll released Nov. 3, 1936, moved Northwestern all the way to No. 1, the first time in school history the Wildcats topped the national rankings. They held that spot for a few weeks, including a 9-0 win at Michigan, before a season-ending trip to Notre Dame Stadium. Notre Dame won that game 26-6, Northwestern’s only loss of the year, and the Wildcats fell to No. 7 in the final AP poll, which in this era was released before bowl season, so there was no chance to recover afterward. Minnesota regained the No. 1 spot and was crowned the AP’s first-ever national champion, a genuinely odd outcome given that Minnesota had actually lost head-to-head to Northwestern that season and didn’t even win their own conference.
Northwestern still won the Big Ten title outright at 6-0 in conference play, mirroring that final score against second-place Minnesota, outscoring opponents 132 to 73 on the year. Guard Steve Reid was a consensus first-team All-American.
The origin story of Waldorf’s hire is also worth telling. In 1933, Northwestern president Walter Dill Scott was invited to a temperance dinner in Chicago but couldn’t attend, so athletic director Kenneth Wilson went in his place. Wilson ended up seated between UChicago coaching legend Amos Alonzo Stagg and a Methodist bishop named Ernest Lynn Waldorf, who mentioned in small talk that his son was a football coach out in Oklahoma. That casual dinner conversation is credited as the spark that eventually led Wilson to hire him as head coach in 1935.
In his first season, Waldorf immediately delivered Northwestern’s first win over Notre Dame in 35 years and was named Big Ten Coach of the Year. The 1936 title and the brief run at No. 1 followed one year later. Waldorf went on to coach seven Northwestern All-Americans, was named National Coach of the Year in 1945 and remained the winningest coach in program history until Pat Fitzgerald overtook him, with 49 victories across 11 seasons, before leaving for the University of California in 1947.
Big happening: Northwestern beat the team that would go on to be crowned the AP’s inaugural national champion, briefly held the No. 1 ranking itself, and still ended up finishing seventh overall.
