College Football Shouldn’t Always Have a National Champion

Tom Fornelli wrote a blog post the other day that started, “I miss the BCS.”

It’s a good post. Quick read, if you’re interested. Here’s the link.

Two passages especially stood out from it, to me. The first:

Now, all we do is debate which team should be No. 4 and whether it’s fair that teams from Group of Five conferences have no chance. Instead of a set of rankings, we have a group of rotating characters with personal biases of their own gathering in a room (or on Zoom) and ranking teams based on whatever criteria fits at the time.

The second:

The College Football Playoff has made the season one four-month-long debate show in which people yell opinions they don’t really believe back and forth at one another and just hope enough people are attracted to the sideshow that the checks continue to roll in. And I hate it.

That about sums it up, right?

Fornelli goes on to run some numbers—average margin of victory, how many games were one-score games in each format, how many were three-or-more-score games. He points out that the competition has not been as good in the College Football Playoff semifinals, specifically, as it was in the national championship in the BCS system.

One thing he didn’t address that I’d like to touch on is that the College Football Playoff has had two teams, in its seven years, win the championship from outside the top two spots in the final rankings. Ohio State, who lost by two touchdowns and two extra points at home to Virginia Tech in 2014, won a title through this format. Alabama, who lost by two touchdowns and no extra points at Auburn in 2017 and failed to win the SEC, won a title through this format. I don’t mind that it happened. On the days the games were played, those teams were probably the best. But that first phrase—“on the days the games were played”—is important, because it gets at the crux of the problem:

There is not always a college football team that is clearly the national champion, taking the season as a whole.

I’m not saying a national champion needs to cover every spread. I’m not saying a national champion can’t have been tested by a surprising foe. But we accept some bad national champions in college football.

For the last three years, we’ve had a legitimate national champion. 2018 Clemson, 2019 LSU, and 2020 Alabama were all historically dominant, to the point that even Alabama, for me at least, was likable this past fall. But it weakens the word “champion” if the national champion wasn’t good enough to win its conference, like Alabama wasn’t in 2017. It weakens the word “champion” if the national champion was allowed to take a dump on the field in September and call it a football game, like Ohio State was in 2014. It weakens the word “champion” if the champion lost to Pitt, like Clemson did in 2016. Alabama’s September loss to Mississippi in 2015 is more ambiguous—Mississippi was pretty good that year, the game was in September, Alabama did win the SEC—but even with that considered, 2015 Alabama was not 2018 Clemson or 2019 LSU or 2020 Alabama.

The BCS would have weeded out 2014 Ohio State and 2017 Alabama, but it would have let a poorer team than them (in December) win the “championship.” An eight-team playoff, let to run forever, would eventually allow an even worse team to get through.

Is there a solution? Well, yes. There needs to be a term for teams like those that have won the College Football Playoff the last three years. “Undefeated national champion” doesn’t do it justice. “Undisputed national champion”—to choose a term for champions in the pre-national championship era—doesn’t do it justice.

The term should just be “national champion.” We should call every CFP winner the CFP champion and only some the national champion. That won’t happen, of course. Which is why we need a better term. There will still be dumb debates. This is college football, after all. But arguing over whether 2015 Alabama was good enough to be called the “national champion” and not just the “CFP champion” is more sensible than screaming about which of two clearly unchampionic teams, like 2020 Notre Dame and 2020 Texas A&M, should be in the College Football Playoff. Better still, we’d get to appreciate the teams that really did win the national championship, instead of lumping them in with teams that couldn’t hang with 2014 Virginia Tech.