I added support for games that end in a tie with this commit. With my recency bias I had left that out and marked it “hard” in my head but it doesn’t seem like it takes much. It changes a couple of 1970s results. I had credited San Diego State with one too many titles. The 1979 season is another one where USC was getting credit for their tie.
The standings sort algorithm I’m using now counts ties against total games but adds nothing for winning percentage, so a tie is effectively a loss for the major calculation. That leads to this situation:
1979 ordered standings 1. Long Beach State 3-1 2. San José State 5-2 3. USC 2-0-1
I do like the idea of USC getting the short end of it. The other obvious way would be to credit ties as half a win in the sort function.