For years, fans of impressive but small programs like Boise State and University of Houston that dominate their respective conferences swore that if they only had the chance, they could run with the big boys that commanded the SEC, Big Ten, and PAC-12. Meanwhile, devotees of traditional powerhouses like Notre Dame, Alabama, and USC were constantly at each other’s throats, each laying out the case that their team deserved a shot to play in the national championship game. Finally, in 2014, the NCAA created the first College Football Playoff, where four teams would have the chance to duke it out for a chance to take home the championship trophy. That means four teams playing in a pair of semifinals for a shot at making it all the way to the National Championship game. Here’s the path taken to the College Football Playoff.
How college football finally got its playoff
From coaches’ polls to computer algorithms to a committee of 13, we take a look at how college football has crowned champions through the ages.
The BCS era
The road to the CFP’s creation wasn’t always a straight and narrow one. After all, there are 130 Division I college football teams spread across 10 different conferences, a size and distribution issue that makes solving gridiron superiority as complicated as calculus. (That’s not just an analogy either; one of the ways that the NCAA used to determine national champions was a complicated math equation.) The complexity of attempting to rank 130 teams spread across geographies and conferences forced the NCAA to look for solutions everywhere, from polling coaches and sportswriters to working with statisticians to bring some cold objectivity into a passionate debate.
Things changed in 1998 when six major conferences and a handful of independent schools got together and formed the Bowl Championship Series. The BCS was a new selection system that took into account both poll rankings and a computer ranking comprised of six different algorithms that considered factors like strength of schedule and win differential to form a new, more exact system for choosing who would play for a national championship. The deciding games rotated between the Fiesta, Sugar, Orange, and Rose bowls, with Tennessee winning the inaugural matchup in Tempe, Arizona, over Florida State.
The birth of the CFP
The BCS was the dominant force in the college football landscape for nearly two decades and ushered in a new era of choosing who would play for the national title. But fans still wanted to see more games. They got their wish in 2014, when the College Football Playoff debuted. The CFP rankings are determined by a 13-member selection committee that ranks the top 25 teams in the country; the top four teams head to the CFP. This year, the Goodyear Cotton Bowl Classic in Dallas and the Capital One Orange Bowl in Miami will serve as the sites of the CFP semifinals.
The CFP hasn’t been around that long, but it’s already produced some of the most memorable matchups in years. In the very first year, we saw fourth-seeded Ohio State beat number-one Alabama by a single touchdown before going on to trounce Oregon in the national championship game. In any other year, Ohio State wouldn’t have even sniffed a shot at the trophy, but thanks to the CFP they walked away with the ultimate prize. And who could forget 2018’s national championship game, where Kendrick Lamar performed at halftime and Georgia lost in heartbreaking fashion to perennial powerhouse Alabama?
This year’s installment of the CFP, with the halftime headliner Imagine Dragons, promises to write another exciting chapter in the college football record books. Can the Oklahoma Sooners win their first playoff game? How will Notre Dame handle their CFP debut? Can Clemson get to their third national championship game in the CFP era? Will anyone stop Alabama? Find out when these four squads kick off on December 29, each looking for a berth in the College Football Playoff National Championship Game at Levi’s Stadium January 7, 2019.