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The original was posted on /r/cfb by /u/Charlemagne42 on 2025-01-27 14:30:03+00:00.
Ohio State has won the 2024 season’s College Football Playoff, and are the #UND12PUTED national champions. Or are they? At the time of this post, two separate organizations have named Oregon the FBS national champions. Does this mean Ohio State has a split title? Will the record books forever list Ohio State as National Champions 2024*?
To answer these questions and more, let’s take a trip through history. I promise you’ll learn something, and you might even have some fun along the way.
What is a title anyway?
And who decides who gets one?
As near as the record books can reckon, the earliest attempts to name a national champion of college football were in magazines. However, most early publications produced rankings of teams rather than naming a champion explicitly. These magazines circulated regionally - and they did not tend to include teams outside their distribution. The rankings also were normally produced by a single writer. The first known ranking which partially addressed these issues was the Associated Press’s poll of sportswriters, in November 1934. In 1935 an AP writer named three national champions, and the next year began the familiar weekly poll of sportswriters, culminating in a national champion. A few years earlier, a group of national sportswriters polled three years in a row to award the Albert Russel Erskine Trophy by single vote. In its last year, the organizers even convinced the Rose Bowl to invite the sportswriters’ top two teams to play for the trophy, 1931 USC and Tulane.
However, polls were not the only method of ranking teams or determining champions. University sports quickly gained the attention - fixation? - of mathematicians both professional and amateur. The earliest well-documented… okay, documented math system for ranking college football teams was produced by Caspar Whitney for Outing magazine in 1905. Whitney had previously worked with Harper’s Weekly magazine producing college football content, and may have been involved with early opinion-based rankings they published. Math systems caught on more seriously in the 1920s, with the Dickinson, Houlgate, and Dunkel systems all originating within 5 years of one another. More systems were invented in the 1930s. Rarely did they agree. They suffered from many of the same problems as regional magazines: single sources, unreliable information, and exclusion of entire conferences, for example.
What about the hardware?
Every national champion needs a trophy to put in the case. Teams use trophies to legitimize themselves in the eyes of their institutions, their onlookers, and their peers. The best-recorded early CFB trophies were awarded to the 1917 Georgia Tech Golden Tornado, coached by John Heisman, following a 9-0 season. The golden footballs were presented to the team by an alumni association at a campus banquet. Then, in 1919, an athletic club in New England put up a trophy to be awarded only upon a unanimous vote of its directors. That trophy was awarded three times, all to Knute Rockne’s Notre Dame, between 1924 and 1930. The Erskine trophy mentioned above was also awarded just three times, twice to the same Notre Dame team that won the Bonniwell, and once to USC who had beaten Notre Dame. Around the same time, a few other organizations and individuals began awarding trophies, like Dickinson, Houlgate, and Litkenhous’s math systems.
So why not ask the schools themselves?
In the formative years of college football, some institutions promoted and sponsored their school teams, while other institutions were unaware they even had a team. A challenge for new teams, and even for long-running successful teams, was to accrue legitimacy within the halls and walls of their own campuses. Naming themselves NATIONAL CHAMPIONS and hanging a banner, literally, on campus was very effective. And, once institutionalized, football programs began retroactively naming themselves champions of past seasons.
Retroactive championships were not the schools’ invention. The early Houlgate math system computed retroactive champions back to 1885, and the poll sponsored by the Helms Athletic Foundation retroactively named champions back to 1883. Schools merely chose to claim championships won in successful seasons of history. Some were backed by media polls, some by math systems, even some by a contemporary trophy collecting dust in a closet. Some schools claimed championships with even less supporting evidence. So which claims are “real”?
Enter the NCAA. It was founded in 1906 around football and other sports. Primarily a rules organization, its functions grew as its member institutions’ needs for a neutral intermediary grew. When institutions needed to know which national title claims were valid, the NCAA stepped in to help. Before we can go any further, first we need to detour through some history of the NCAA’s football structure.
How does the NCAA award titles?
And how did the NCAA’s divisions get here anyway?
You know what else began in 1906? The forward pass. (Heisman, again.) From its inception, the NCAA has been about football. Among the core rules disagreements it was created to settle were the inclusion of, and procedures defining, the forward pass which today sets American football apart from earlier forms of sport. Since then, the NCAA has grown to sponsor 90 sports, three major Divisions, and at last count 1,097 schools. But, for the first half-century of its history, the NCAA was undivided.
In 1957, the NCAA formed two Divisions, the University Division for large programs, and the College Division for small programs. This split was driven mainly by basketball. The NCAA had begun sponsoring an annual tournament in 1939 to determine a basketball national champion, and the split afforded smaller schools a chance to compete for a national championship in a separate tournament from the larger, more competitive schools. In 1973 the question of athletic scholarships drove a further wedge into the NCAA, splitting the College Division on the basis of allowing or disallowing athletic aid. The University Division was renamed Division I, the scholarship side of the College Division was renamed Division II, and the non-scholarship side became Division III.
Finally, in 1978, one last schism split Division I into two1 Subdivisions, on the basis of the football postseason. Specifically, the basis of how to determine a football national champion. One Subdivision’s champion is determined by an annual tournament. It started with four invitations. Now, it is much larger, featuring conference champion auto-bids and at-large bids invited by a Selection Committee to fill the bracket. The winner is crowned NCAA Division I Football National Champion. This Subdivision is called the Football Championship Subdivision, originally known as Division I-AA. Its tournament began in the first year of the D1 split, 1978, and has continued uninterrupted.
The other Subdivision, initially called Division I-A, is now referred to as the Football Bowl Subdivision. It is, today, the only[citation needed] NCAA sporting classification without an NCAA-run event to determine its champion. Instead of a postseason meet or postseason tournament, the FBS formed for the purpose of continuing the historic college football tradition of postseason bowl games.
So how does the NCAA award FBS titles?
It doesn’t. To understand why, let’s detour a second time. First stop, Pasadena.
How are bowls involved with awarding titles?
Bowls and Polls
The history of bowl games is fairly well-known here, so I’ll focus on how bowls are connected to the naming of a national champion.
As polls accrued gravitas within the football world, gradually they also accreted unwritten obligations. Bowl games had existed before all the major polls. They featured many of the elements necessary to legitimize a national title claim. For example, they featured two successful teams, from different conferences (reducing regionalism issues), after the end of the season, and the two teams played a football game to win a trophy. Surely the “best” team to win the “best” bowl game against the “best” opponent would have a strong claim on a national title. And so it became expected for poll voters to consider high-profile likely bowl game winners more favorably in their final, national-champion-selecting, ballots.
At the time of the University-College split, 5 major bowl games were [inviting top teams](en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar…
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