*The ISFL Title Belt

[Starboy]

There’s a general rule in sports that to be the best, you have to beat the best. A lot of different forms of finding out who the best is have come around with every sport where some have mastered the art of playoff systems, championships, and determining the best of the best. Football has had many different forms of trying to determine champions where there used to be a separate method to find champions before the Super Bowl by using win/loss records and in college football there were more ways to find champions than there were actual champions. Sometimes it gets confusing trying to find the best method possible, (see the College Football Playoff which is still with its many doubters) but one sport has setup an interesting method to determining the best by literally using the phrase “to be the best, you have to beat the best.” That sport is boxing where you have to beat the person with the title belt in order to get the belt for yourself. Sure, this method sounds crazy for football but a project was taken up for college football that has kept track of a title belt starting with the very first game leading up to the current holder of the belt, the Arkansas Razorbacks that won it from the Mississippi State Bulldogs on October 3rd, 2020 (current as of the time writing this).

This method of keeping track of champions got me curious what the ISFL Title Belt would end up looking like. The method of determining the original holder of the belt wasn’t as easy as college football with finding out the first game and following it through since I was not around in the pre-S1 NSFL. However, I decided to start the Belt off with the S1 Ultimus winner, the Arizona Outlaws. The way to keep the Belt is to win. Simple as that. You win then you defend the belt from being taken by anyone else, but if you lose, then you pass the Belt onto the team that beat you. Just because a team wins the Ultimus, does not mean the Belt moves onto them. In fact, a lot of Ultimus winners did not hold onto the Belt but there are some that managed to sneak the Belt away from a team before carrying it through the offseason. We’re going to go through the transitions the Belt has gone through from that S1 Ultimus winning Outlaws team all the way through Week 1 of the S25 games and then onward once we are all caught up.

To understand the wins and losses mentioned in the series, the game where a team wins over the Belt does not count as a win with the Belt since they just got the Belt. The wins listed with the Belt holding teams are the defenses of the Belt that they have. I’ll be going over any interesting moments in the Belt’s history which is a very long history so not everyone will get a moment talked about. To begin:

How to read the charts, the first column is the season and team that had it, then you had the amount of wins that a team had before losing the Belt, and then when that team lost the Belt

S2:


S3:


S4:


S5:


S6:


S7:


S8:


S9:


S10:


S11:


S12:


S13:


S14:


S15:


S16:


S17:


S18:


S19:


S20:


S21:


S22:


S23:


S24:




Some interesting notes for those interested in learning more about the Title Belt and its many fun adventures include a great deal of history of the league. The charts here make it easy to track the entire Belt's history. Here are some more stats and 'awards' for our introduction:

Records:

Baltimore 25-18
Chicago 5-2
Colorado 11-10
Philadelphia 11-14
Sarasota 3-4
Yellowknife 14-26-1
Arizona 27-18-1
Austin 7-7
Orange County 54-29
New Orleans 19-27
San Jose 15-12

(if any numbers are wrong, I apologize)

Longest Defense Streak:

Baltimore - 9 wins (S10)
Chicago - 5 wins (S16)
Colorado - 7 wins (S24)
Philadelphia - 4 wins (S7)
Sarasota - 3 wins (S24)
Yellowknife - 4 wins (S18)
Arizona - 11 wins (S3) *LONGEST DEFENSE
Austin - 3 wins (S22)
Orange County - 10 wins (S18)
New Orleans - 8 wins (S21)
San Jose - 6 wins (S14)


From here on, I will be doing a weekly tracking for keeping up with Belt and going on through the games with Title defenses. This has been an introduction into the ISFL Title Belt, and definitely a much more reliable way to determine champions.