Over the past 151 years, college football has been an integral part of American society. Entire economies are dependent on how many people show up to the stadium on Saturdays. Identities are formed based on the school you choose to support. Even families have divides based on which state school brother A went to verses which state school brother B went to.
In the ven diagram of arguing and college football, smack in the middle lies a simple question:
Who is the national champion?
In a sport that is rooted in regionalism, finding a consensus national champion is a very difficult task. In this piece, we will explore the different era of college football, and explore how the time period, technology, and regional bias had an effect on determining the best college football team in the nation.
The first college football game was played in 1869 between Rutgers and Princeton. It was actually very easy to determine who the national champion was this year because there were only two teams. Princeton won the first game, while Rutgers won the second. Thus giving us our first split champions.
Throughout the rest of the 19th century, other schools in the northeast decided to start football programs as a way to increase enrollment and exposure of their schools. Soon, the Ivy League was formed and schools such as Yale and Harvard dedicated more resources towards developing their football programs. This resulted in the Ivys dominating the small, but growing, college football landscape
In the early 20th century, we start to see a rise in football programs in the midwest and the south. Modern-day powerhouses like Ohio State and Michigan see their programs begin to rise. Legendary coaches like John Heisman (yes, that one) and Bobby Dodd establish college football as cultural identities in the south while coaching at Georgia Tech. Safety changes are made to the game so that young men can live past the age of 26.
Once the game moves out beyond the bubble of the northeast, we see individual programs start to claim national championships with the help of local newspapers. Today, we can watch an east coast game at noon, a game being played in Iowa at 4:00, a game being played in Texas at 8:00, and end our evening seeing what the Hawaii Rainbow Warriors are up to. In the early 20th century, that wasn’t the case. Those who couldn’t make it to the game in person had to find out what happened the next day via the newspaper.
As a result of regionalism, different newspapers named different champions based on what they saw locally.
That’s how we get a situation like 1919, where Harvard, Illinois, Notre Dame, and Texas A&M all claim national championships.
1922: Cal, Cornell, and Princeton.
1926: Alabama and Stanford
1930: Alabama and Notre Dame
It wasn’t until 1935 that we started getting consistency amongst newspapers across the country.
In 1935, Alan J. Gould of the Associated Press had an idea. He wanted to unify the opinions of sportswriters from across the country and publish those opinions in the AP. He developed a system where he would tally up the votes from sportswriters in different regions of the country and combine them into one, unified poll. Thus, the AP poll was born.
Since it’s inception, the AP poll has been a pulse on what the country thinks the best teams in the nation are. During World War II, it served to keep the nation updated on how the naval academies were doing. As the war approached, many college-aged men left their universities to go off and fight in the war. As a result, many programs suffered. Not Army and Navy. The academies saw an influx of young men not only ready to defend their country but ready to play football. It’s no surprise that Army won back-to-back national championships in 1944 and 1945.
In 1950, United Press decided to compete with the AP in ranking the best college football teams in the nation. Their philosophy was that sportswriters shouldn’t be deciding who the national champion was, it should be the coaches that are around the game every day. This opened up the flood gates for controversy and, what would come to be known as, split-decisions.
Both the UPI and AP polls saw their share of criticism. With the onset of television, big games were able to be broadcast across the country, exposing millions of people to schools such as Oklahoma, Alabama, Notre Dame, etc. The voters, however, still came from the same regional spots that they were in the 20s. In cases where two or three teams faired similarly, the voters tended to side with the school closest to them.
“The AP awards poll votes according to how many FBS schools there are in a given state. Ohio, Texas, and California all have more voters than, say, Wyoming. In that sense, regional bias was baked into the cake. I think it’s clear that regional bias played a role in the 1966 voting, when Alabama, the only 11-0 team that season, finished third. Some writers penalized the Crimson Tide for Gov. Wallace, for Selma, for all the bad things happening within the state.”
That’s ESPN college football writer Ivan Maisel on how much regional bias weighed on AP voters. Not only did the play of their local teams have an effect on their voting, but politics played a large factor as well. For the record, the split-champions for 1966 were Notre Dame and Michigan St.
Two teams above the Mason-Dixon line.
If the civil rights movement could play an indirect factor in determining the national champion, then segregation was front and center. Northern teams were quicker to integrate their teams than southern teams. Bear Bryant, legendary Alabama coach, famously tried to integrate his teams in the 60s but was met with pushback from the state government. It took a blowout loss to USC, an integrated team, in 1970 for the Alabama state government to change its stance on integration. And it wasn’t just a problem for Alabama in the 60s.
“Segregation played a larger role than is realized. You can see it most vividly as programs began to integrate after World War II. It’s simple math. When schools began recruiting black players in earnest in the 1950s, the schools had more players to choose from. Look at the dominance of Michigan State in the mid-1960s. Look at how the Southern schools faded from the tops of the polls from 1965-1970.”
Maisel is right. By being quicker to integrate than the Southern schools, Northern schools had a leg up on the field. They actually made it easier for the writers to implement their regional bias.
In 1993, the public had had enough of split-champions and a lack of consensus. From a desire to see the two best teams battle it out on the field came the idea for the Bowl Coalition. The Coalition was made up of the major bowl games and the major conferences. By combining forces, bowl games and conferences could work with the polls in order to create #1 vs #2 matchups. A de-facto national championship game. A winner-take-all bowl game to determine the national champion once and for all. There was only one problem: the Rose Bowl.
The Rose Bowl is the oldest bowl game in history. It traditionally hosts the champions of the Big 10 and Pac-12 conferences on January 1st. Because the Rose Bowl did not want to risk breaking apart from that tradition, they decided not to participate in the Bowl Coalition. No Rose Bowl meant no Big 10 and Pac-10 (Pac-12 now). It took another split title in 1997 for the Rose Bowl to get on the same page with everyone else. Enter: the BCS.
The BCS was a way for analytics and tradition to intersect. It took the AP and Coaches polls and plugged them into a computer that took into account strength of schedule, margin of victory, and other mathematical formulas used to determine how good, or bad, a team was.
Ideally, it was supposed to take the regional bias out of the equation. No more “east coast bias.” No more personal gripes against certain programs. The computer gives you a result, and you accept it as fact. Except, sometimes, the computer didn’t see everything that was going on. It routinely left out programs in smaller conferences, even though their performance on the field warranted them at least an opportunity to play for a championship. Most notably, the mid-2000 Boise State Broncos, a team that won 84 games in a 7-year stretch and only got as far as two lower-level BCS bowl appearances.
It wasn’t just the smaller schools it affected. The “big boys” got hit too. Throughout the 2000s, teams like Miami, Auburn, Oregon, and Michigan all had genuine complaints about not making the title game. At least with the polls, you could listen to a human being make a case for why your team didn’t deserve to make it. With the computer, you not only were left wondering why you didn’t make it, you were left thinking “if only we had beaten that team by 60 instead of 53.” It was an inconsistent mess that created the perfect storm for what came next.
In 2014, the bowls and major conferences decided to implement a four-team playoff to determine the national champion. They formed a committee made up of former players, coaches, media members, even politicians. Anyone in this country that had an interest in college football. They set the criteria and emphasized one thing above all: they were looking for the four best teams in the country.
With such a vague phrase, the committee gave themselves complete power to decide which teams made it. They listed things like conference championship as points to consider, but they were not bound to them. They simply wanted the four best teams to compete for a national championship.
Some see the CFP to be just as exclusive as the BCS, where teams outside the top conferences had virtually no chance to compete for a national championship. In 2017, UCF finished the year as the only undefeated team in the country. They had a dynamic offense and a defense led by senior leadership that, just two years prior, experienced an 0-12 season. From winless to undefeated faster than anyone else in history. The committee rewarded them with a #12 ranking and a birth in their newly branded New Year’s Six bowls, a contractual requirement given to the highest-ranked non-Power 5 team. After beating #7 Auburn (who themselves beat two of the four playoff participants) they went rouge and declared themselves national champions, citing a mathematical system that the NCAA recognizes.
The only way for teams like UCF to have a legitimate shot at the playoffs is to expand it from four teams to eight. Ivan Maisel understands that, but he doesn’t necessarily agree with it.
“I expect it to expand. I hope it doesn’t. I think trying to fit five conference champions into four slots creates season-long tension and drama that is valuable, financially and otherwise, to the sport. Lose that, and you lose the season-long tension. Lose that, and you have late-season games in which a team or teams will have clinched a bid and won’t want to endanger it. But I fully expect an eight-team playoff, because money is important.”
All signs point to expansion. As Maisel said, there is just too much money to be left on the table for them not to include eight teams. More teams mean more games. More games mean more money. And if there’s one thing the bowls and conferences want more of, it’s money.
At the center of this immensely regional sport is always the question of who is the best nationally. It’s the constant oxymoron that is ever-present in college football culture. It’s the reason why no matter how many changes are made to the game, both on and off the field, there is one question asked at the beginning of each season:
When’s the Natty?