The 1935 college football season was the last one before the Associated Press writers' poll was used in selecting the national champion. The Dickinson System, consisting of the calculations of University of Illinois Professor Frank Dickinson, crowned Southern Methodist University (SMU) as the best in the nation. A poll of newspaper writers, taken at year's end—by United Press rather than the AP—concluded that the University of Minnesota's eleven was the best in the nation. Major conferences that existed in 1934 were the Western Conference, the Pacific Coast Conference, the Southeastern Conference, the old Southern Conference, the Big Six and the Southwest Conference.