The College Football All-Southern Team was an all-star team of college football players from the Southern United States. The honor was given annually to the best players at their respective positions. It is analogous to the All-America Team and was most often selected in newspapers. Notable pickers of All-Southern teams include John Heisman, Dan McGugin, George C. Marshall, Grantland Rice, W. A. Lambeth, Reynolds Tichenor, Nash Buckingham, Innis Brown, and Dick Jemison.

Princeton's 115-0 drubbing of Virginia in 1890 marked football's arrival in the south by playing a northern school. Virginia was considered the Southern champion.

Major football programs in the South used to include: members of the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association (SIAA), the conference representative of the Deep South and used more strictly to mean the South east of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, the predecessor to today's Southeastern Conference (SEC, which originally represented the Southern states west and south of the Appalachians); the South Atlantic Intercollegiate Athletic Association (SAIAA), representative of the South Atlantic States and especially Virginia and North Carolina, the predecessor to today's Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC); and the Southwest Conference, representative of the Southwest United States, a predecessor to southern portions of today's Big 12 Conference. These categories apply only broadly. For example, North Carolina was in both the SIAA and SAIAA at different points in its history. Clemson, today in the ACC, was in the SIAA; and Washington & Lee, today in neither, was a member of the SAIAA.

The SIAA was the oldest of these, founded in the winter of 1894 by Vanderbilt chemistry professor William Lofland Dudley. The SIAA was often seen as large enough to represent the South at large; and with officials and coaches and so forth of potential selectors restricted to viewing conference play, an All-SIAA team was sometimes equivalent to the All-Southern team; apparently with increasing frequency since 1902. For example, the 1905 composite selection from the Atlanta Journal reads "It must be taken into consideration, however, that each gridiron Sir Oracle was requested by the Journal to confine his selections to members of clubs composing the S. I. A. A. This organization really represents the greater south, as its scope is wider and more general. V. P. I. can scarcely be figured in the calculation as that institution hasn't played any of the S. I. A. A. representatives." South Atlantic writers of course were not fond of this, and would sometimes critique the latest All-Southern selection with titles such as "Virginia and Carolina no longer in the South."

In 1922 teams from the SIAA and SAIAA left for the Southern Conference and All-Southern teams become effectively All-Southern Conference teams. By 1933 the contemporary Southeastern Conference was established. The major programs then in the SEC, "All-Southern" teams become associated with the by comparison minor conferences of the Southern Conference or SIAA especially after the formation of the Atlantic Coast Conference in 1953.

Walter Camp's annual "official" All-America first team had been historically loaded with college players from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, and other Northeastern colleges. The dominance of Ivy League players on Camp's All-America teams led to criticism over the years that his selections were biased against players from the leading Western universities (then in America the West meant the Great Lakes region), including Chicago, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Notre Dame. Many selectors picked only Eastern players. For example, Wilton S. Farnsworth's All-American eleven of 1910 for the New York Evening Journal was made up of five players from Harvard, two from West Point, and one each from Yale, Princeton, Penn, and Brown. In 1894, Michigan defeated Cornell and lobbied for its center Fatty Smith to be the first Western All-American. The resistance to selecting Smith (or any other Western player) as an All-American is reflected in the following newspaper account from December 1894:

"Some of the western colleges have developed great players on their teams and this year may claim for them a position on the All American team. Notably the University of Michigan claims for their center 'Fatty' Smith the supremacy in his position. But the western institutions have not yet mastered the eastern knowledge of all the details and fine points of the game. Smith has made a great record against the west and even against Cornell, but the Ithacan center was not a master of his position. When brought to face a man like the Stillman of today or the Bulliet of last year, Smith would simply be lost and entirely out generaled. So it would be with all of the claimants for line positions from western teams. And no one claims for a moment that western back field men could play in the same class with eastern men."

The selectors were typically Eastern writers and former players who attended only games in the East. In December 1910, The Mansfield News, an Ohio newspaper, ran an article headlined: "All-American Teams of East Are Jokes: Critics Who Never Saw Western Teams Play to Name Best in Country -- Forget About Michigan, Minnesota and Illinois." The article noted: "Eastern sporting editors must be devoid of all sense of humor, judging by the way in which they permit their football writers to pick 'All-American' elevens. What man in the lot that have picked 'All-American' elevens this fall, saw a single game outside the North Atlantic States? With a conceit all their own they fail to recognize that the United States reaches more than 200 miles in any direction from New York. ... Suppose an Ohio football writer picked 'All-American' teams. Ohio readers would not stand for it. But apparently the eastern readers will swallow anything."