How the belt works

A lineal championship works like a boxing title: to become the champion, you have to beat the champion. Every league on this site has exactly one belt, and it has been passed from team to team, game by game, since that league's first game.

The rules every league shares

1. It starts at game one. The winner of a league's first game picks up the belt.
2. Beat the holder, take the belt. Any game counts — regular season or playoffs, home, away or neutral. Preseason and exhibition games don't.
3. Ties go to the champ. A tie is a successful defense.
4. The belt follows the franchise. Relocations and renames don't reset anything.
5. Folded holders. If the holder's franchise folds or stops playing, the belt goes back to the most recent earlier holder that is still playing, the same rule our sister site, the College Football Belt, uses.

League notes

NFL. The belt starts with the first league game on record: Dayton Triangles 14–0 Columbus Panhandles on October 3, 1920. Games from 1920 count only between clubs that were members of the league that season. AFL (1960–69) and AAFC (1946–49) games are included, so those teams could only reach the belt by beating an NFL holder. Franchise histories follow the team through moves and renames (the Rams are one franchise from Cleveland to St. Louis to Los Angeles).

NBA, NHL, MLB. Coming soon, each with its own notes on shootouts, the ABA and WHA, and the early professional leagues.

Sources

NFL results from 1920–2020 come from FiveThirtyEight's public NFL game archive; 2021 onward from the open nflverse project. The data is updated automatically after every game day.