[ad_1]
It’s one of the silliest features of maybe the silliest sport on the planet: If you were to add up all of the national championships claimed in top-level college football, you would think the sport dated back to the 1600s. Princeton claims 28 of them, Yale 27. Alabama claims 23 — including one from a 9-2 campaign in 1941! — and Notre Dame claims 22. That’s 100 right there! And 25 other schools claim at least five!
On one hand, so be it. Fielding a football team is hard, and fielding an elite team is even harder, and if you want to hang a banner for doing that (or some approximation of it), hang the damn banner.
On the other hand, this is kind of a mess. The BCS and College Football Playoff eras have cleaned things up a bit — we have had only one official split national title since the BCS began in 1998 — but the sport’s history is littered with unsettled arguments. So let’s settle some of them.
Below are 16 seasons featuring some of the sport’s biggest disagreements. They include all 11 of the split national titles of the poll era — when the AP selected one champion and the UPI/coaches poll selected another — plus five other particularly interesting arguments. To decide these titles, I will use key results and résumés, key averages, poll ratings and my historical SP+ ratings.
The banners can stay up, but let’s talk about who really deserved some rings.
Note: Scoring averages below do not take games against non-Division I (before the 1980s) or FCS opponents into account.
1947: Notre Dame (9-0) vs. Michigan (10-0)
AP poll rankings: Notre Dame first, Michigan second
SP+ rankings: Michigan first (31.8 rating), Notre Dame second (29.9)
Avg. points scored: Michigan 39.4, Notre Dame 32.3
Avg. points allowed: Michigan 5.3, Notre Dame 5.8
Best wins: Notre Dame def. Army (fourth in SP+) 27-7, def. USC (14th) 38-7; Michigan def. USC (14th) 49-0, def. Illinois (19th) 14-7.
Verdict: Michigan. Notre Dame and Michigan became fierce rivals late in the 20th century, but they didn’t…
[ad_2]
