College football national championships in NCAA Division I FBS
A national championship in the highest level of college football in the United States, currently the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision, is a designation awarded annually by various organizations to their selection of the best college football team. Division I FBS football is the only National Collegiate Athletic Association sport for which the NCAA does not host a yearly championship event. As such, it is sometimes referred to as a "mythical national championship".
Due to the lack of an official NCAA title, determining the nation's top college football team has often engendered controversy. A championship team is independently declared by multiple individuals and organizations, often referred to as "selectors". These choices are not always unanimous. In 1969 even the president of the United States, Richard Nixon, made a selection by announcing, ahead of the season-ending "game of the century" between No. 1 Texas and No. 2 Arkansas, that the winner would receive a presidential plaque commemorating them as national champions despite the fact that Texas and Arkansas still had to play in a bowl game afterward. Texas went on to win, 15–14.
While the NCAA has never officially endorsed a championship team, it has documented the choices of some selectors in its official NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision Records publication. In addition, various analysts have independently published their own choices for each season. These opinions can often diverge with others as well as individual schools' claims to national titles, which may or may not correlate to the selections published elsewhere. Historically, the two most widely recognized national championship selectors are the Associated Press, which conducts a poll of sportswriters, and the Coaches Poll, a survey of active members of the American Football Coaches Association.
Since 1992, various consortia of major bowl games have aimed to invite the top two teams at the end of the regular season to compete in what is intended to be the de facto national championship game. The current iteration of this practice, the College Football Playoff, selects twelve teams to participate in a national first round or quarterfinals, with the final four teams advancing to the semifinals. The games of the quarterfinals and semifinals are hosted by all of the six partner bowl games, with the final two remaining teams advancing to the College Football Playoff National Championship.
History
The concept of a national championship in college football dates to the early years of the sport in the late 19th century. Some of the earliest contemporaneous rankings can be traced to Caspar Whitney in Harper's Weekly, J. Parmly Paret in Outing, Charles Patterson, and New York newspaper The Sun.Claimed intercollegiate championships were limited to various selections and rankings, as the nature of the developing and increasingly violent full-contact sport made it impossible to schedule a post-season tournament to determine an "official" or undisputed champion. National championships in this era were well understood to be "mythical".
Beyond rankings in newspaper columns, awards and trophies began to be presented to teams. In 1917 members of the 9–0 Georgia Tech squad were given gold footballs with the inscription "National Champions" by alumni at their post-season banquet. The Veteran Athletes of Philadelphia put up the Bonniwell Trophy for the national championship in 1919 under the stipulation that it was only "to be awarded in such years as produces a team whose standing is so preeminent as to make its selection as champion of America beyond dispute." Notre Dame was the first to be awarded the trophy, in 1924.
Professor Frank G. Dickinson of Illinois developed the first mathematical ranking system to be widely popularized. Chicago clothing manufacturer Jack F. Rissman donated a trophy for the system's national championship in 1926 onward, first awarded to Stanford prior to their tie with Alabama in the Rose Bowl. A curious Knute Rockne, then coach of Notre Dame, convinced Dickinson and Rissman to backdate the Rissman Trophy two seasons; thus Notre Dame is engraved on the trophy for 1924 and Dartmouth for 1925. The Rissman Trophy was retired by Notre Dame's three wins in 1924, 1929, and 1930; the Knute Rockne Memorial Trophy was put into competition for 1931 following the untimely death of the legendary coach. The popularity of the Dickinson System kicked off a succession of mathematical rankings carried in newspapers and magazines such as the Houlgate System, Azzi Ratem rankings, Dunkel Power Index, Williamson System, and Litkenhous Ratings.
File:Erskine Trophy Presentation 1929 Notre Dame.jpg|thumb|Notre Dame receiving the Albert Russel Erskine Trophy following the 1929 season.
Two short-lived national championship trophies were contemporaries of the Dickinson System awards. The Albert Russel Erskine Trophy was won twice by Notre Dame in 1929 and 1930, as voted by 250 sportswriters from around the country. The large silver Erskine trophy was last awarded to USC on the field in Pasadena following their "national championship game" victory over Tulane in the 1932 Rose Bowl. The Toledo Cup was meant to be a long-running traveling trophy, but was promptly permanently retired by Minnesota's threepeat in 1934, 1935, and 1936.
College football's foremost historian Parke H. Davis compiled a list of "National Champion Foot Ball Teams" for the 1934 edition of Spalding's Official Foot Ball Guide. Davis selected national champions for each year dating back to college football's inaugural season in 1869, for which he selected the sole competitors Princeton and Rutgers as co-champions. Similar retrospective analysis was undertaken in the 1940s by Bill Schroeder of the Helms Athletic Foundation and in Deke Houlgate's The Football Thesaurus in 1954.
The Associated Press began polling sportswriters in 1936 to obtain rankings. Alan J. Gould, the creator of the AP Poll, named Minnesota, Princeton, and SMU co-champions in 1935, and polled writers the following year, which resulted in a national championship for Minnesota. The AP's main competition, United Press, created the first Coaches Poll in 1950. For that year and the next three, the AP and UP agreed on the national champion. The first [|"split" national championship] between the major polls occurred in 1954, when the writers selected Ohio State and the coaches chose UCLA. The two polls have disagreed 11 times since 1950.
Both wire services originally conducted their final polls at the end of the regular season and prior to any bowl games being played. This changed when the AP Poll champion was crowned after the bowls for 1965 and then in 1968 onward. The Coaches Poll began awarding post-bowl championships in 1974. National champions crowned by pre-bowl polls who subsequently lost their bowl game offered an opportunity for other teams to claim the title based on different selectors' awards and rankings, such as the post-bowl FWAA Grantland Rice Award or Helms Athletic Foundation title.
Post-bowl polls allowed for the possibility of a "national championship game" to finally settle the question on the gridiron. But a [|number of challenges] made it difficult to schedule even the season's top two teams to play in a single post-season bowl game, let alone all of the deserving teams. Calls for a college football playoff were frequently made by head coach Joe Paterno of Penn State, whose independent teams finished the 1968, 1969, and 1973 seasons unbeaten, untied, and with Orange Bowl victories yet were left without a single major national title.
The 1980s were marked by a succession of satisfying national championship games in the Orange Bowl and Fiesta Bowl, but the 1990s began with consecutive split AP Poll and Coaches Poll national titles in 1990 and 1991. The Bowl Coalition and then Bowl Alliance were formed to more reliably set up a No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup in a bowl game on New Year's Day, but their efforts were hampered by the Rose Bowl's historic draw and contractual matchup between the Big Ten and Pac-10 conference champions.
The Bowl Championship Series in 1998 succeeded in finally bringing the Big Ten and Pac-10 into the fold with the other conferences for a combined BCS National Championship Game rotated among the Fiesta, Sugar, Orange, and Rose bowls and venues. BCS rankings originally incorporated the two major polls as well as a number of computer rankings to determine the end of season No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup. Although the BCS era did regularly produce compelling matchups, the winnowing selection of the top two teams resulted in many BCS controversies, most notably 2003's split national championship caused by the BCS rankings leaving USC, No. 1 in both human polls, out of the Sugar Bowl. The BCS victors were annually awarded The Coaches' Trophy "crystal football" on the field immediately following the championship game.
In 2014 the College Football Playoff made its debut, facilitating a multi-game single-elimination tournament for the first time in college football history. Until 2024, four teams were seeded by a 13–member selection committee rather than by existing polls or mathematical rankings. The two semifinal games were rotated among the New Year's Six bowl games, and the final was played a week later. Beginning in 2024, the playoff field was expanded to 12 teams. The competition awards its own national championship trophy.