Alabama claims at least 12 and as many as 18 college football national championships, depending on which Alabaman is talking.
These include titles conferred by the College Football Playoff (CFP), BCS, and Associated Press but also, back in the day, by such entities as the Boand and Dickinson Systems, and early stat geeks like Deke Houlgate, Frank Dickinson, and Dick Dunkel, whose goofy rankings appeared in the Lebanon Daily News of my childhood.
Even before that, as Dan Jenkins described the earliest days of the natty in Sports Illustrated, “Somebody like Casper Whitney in Harper’s Weekly or J. Parmly Paret in Outing looked at the records of Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Penn, quickly deciphered which one had out-groped Columbia Law School by the biggest margin, and boldly proclaimed them the mythical national champion. Nobody argued about it, preoccupied as most people were with striking for an eight-hour workday and wondering where Khartoum was.’’
Jenkins wrote that in 1967. In the previous four decades there were 104 national champions according to somebody, and just seven unanimous ones.
It’s possible that “nobody argued about it,’’ because the world was effectively larger and much, much less wired. We’re hyperconnected now, and change happens at warp speed.
That’s not always a bad thing. Nobody liked the seeding format in year one, 2024, with a 12-team field, so it looks like that will change for the coming season.
The sport did a four-team playoff for 10 years, then went to 12 teams last year and, apparently, is headed to 14 teams as early as 2026.
Who decides these things? Ever increasingly, the conferences and their commissioners. Within that group, the currently dominant Big Ten and Southeastern Conferences have bullying power and insist they aren’t going to use it.
After the B10 and SEC honchos met last week, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said the Big Two have, “deployed leadership in a responsible way.”
“People are working together,” said Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti said. “The work that’s been done around the settlement among the conferences is probably unprecedented in terms of the amount of collaboration that’s required to get this right.”
That’s what they’re saying. What’s on the table, according to off-the-record sources cited ESPN’s Heather Dinich and Pete Thamel and others, is a 14-team tournament with the SEC and Big Ten getting four automatic berths each.
The Big 12 and ACC would get two automatics, plus a Group of Five entry and Notre Dame if its ranking justifies it, and an at-large berth for someone else if it doesn’t.
This would kick in in 2026, when ESPN’s new deal with the CFP playoff begins. Dinich and Thamel aren’t making this up. You may not want to hear this, reader, but this is one of many areas where more can be learned from unnamed sources than named ones.
This would, of course, be awful. The Big Ten now has 18 teams and plays nine conference games. The SEC has 16 teams and plays eight. Divisions are gone. Big Ten and SEC teams, in any season, only play half the members of their own league.
Of the top four teams in the Big Ten in 2024, only eventual champion Ohio State played the other three in the regular season. Oregon, Indiana and Penn State played only one of them.
When leagues are that overstuffed, the notion beloved by Penn State’s coach James Franklin that “everybody should be in a conference,’’ to create a “level playing field,’’ is a reach, to be kind.
Franklin’s boss, Penn State AD Pat Kraft, will meet the media tomorrow.
Looking forward to it.
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