The Story of the College Football National Championship Game
In 1997 college football adopted the Bowl Championship Series which finally allowed the sport to determine its national championship on the field 4
1 Until 2014 Division I college football was the only major team sport in the United States that did not use a playoff to determine its champion For decades the national champion was decided by a vote either by reporters and broadcasters or by coaches In many seasons that led to much debate on who should be ranked number one The media poll and the coaches polls came up with different champions 10 times including back-to-back years in 1990 and 1991 Fans wanted a change But college football officials were not eager to start a playoff system Many argued that the players would miss too much time in the classroom Others said that BCS HISTORY SETTLE IT ON THE FIELD 5
adding extra games to the postseason would be too much of a physical burden on the players But eventually the push to determine a champion on the field was too strong to ignore So the Bowl Coalition was developed in 1992 followed by the Bowl Alliance in 1995 Not every conference agreed to participate but these moves brought college football closer to crowning a true champion Finally the Bowl Championship Series BCS was created in 1997 College football finally had a system in place that guaranteed that the top two teams would face each other for the national title The BCS originally used existing bowl games to decide the national champion The title game moved Who’s number one That was often a much-debated topic before the BCS era 6
each year among the Fiesta Sugar Orange and Rose Bowls In 1999 the first BCS championship game took place in the Fiesta Bowl Tennessee beat Florida State 23 16 In 2007 college football added a separate national championship game That was also played in early January at one of those bowl sites But it took place approximately one week after the actual bowl game Finally for the 2014 season college football adopted a four-team playoff system Six bowls were part of the new College Football Playoff Every year two of the bowls would serve as national semifinal games Then the winners would meet at a predetermined site to play the championship game Cities bid for the right to host the title game much as they do for the Super Bowl or the basketball Final Four It was a long road but major college football finally seemed to have the right system in place NUMBER 1 VS NUMBER 2 Before the BCS was in place the top two teams in the final regular-season polls rarely met in a bowl game The first time was in 1963 Number one University of Southern California USC knocked off second-ranked Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day In the next 24 years only seven seasons ended with the top two teams facing off in a bowl game 7
