With the selection committee finally gathering and conducting its initial voting, College Football Playoff executive director Bill Hancock called it “a very important milestone, not only for the playoff, but also the game of college football.”

It only took more than 100 years to get there.

The first year that college football was played, 1869, there were only two teams in existence, and they played twice. Rutgers defeated Princeton 6-4, and in a rematch Princeton beat Rutgers 8-0. Years later, three services retroactively named Princeton the national champion, with one splitting the title between both schools (“Everyone’s a winner!”). Thus, hindsight provided the first controversial title.

Although schools would occasionally self-proclaim themselves champions in general, or regional champions, etc., the notion of a national title really didn’t begin to take hold until the 1920s, when college football really started to grow exponentially in popularity and the pool of teams went from single digits to 100-plus.

The first All-American team was named in 1889, while the first conference, which would eventually become known as the Big Ten, played its first organized season in 1896 (won by Wisconsin). The NCAA was founded, but one crucial mandate the NCAA never handed down was how its Division I champion would be determined. Due to geographical limitations, with teams traveling by train, football was a mostly-regional sport with cross-country contests rarely played. But with football continuing to grow at an alarming rate (an estimated 120,000 fans attended the Southern California vs. Notre Dame game at Chicago’s Soldier Field in 1927), and campuses beginning to construct massive permanent stadiums in an effort to meet demand, it was only a matter of time before the game took its next steps.

The Rose Bowl

In 1902, the Tournament of Roses decided to host the first-ever postseason college football game, and nearby Stanford (3-0-2) accepted an invitation to face Midwest powerhouse Michigan, which had compiled an impressive 10-0 record without giving up a single point. The game wasn’t close as fullback Neil Snow scored five touchdowns and Fielding Yost’s “Point-A-Minute” team crushed Stanford, 49-0, to finish the season with a scoring advantage of 555-0.

Unfortunately, the lopsided outcome temporarily soured organizers on football, and in 1903 they tried polo instead, which attracted only 2,000 people. That was followed by Ben-Hur-style chariot races, which remained the feature draw for 11 years. However, when the horses drew only 25,000 in 1915 and interest had clearly wavered, football was brought back, with organizers pairing Washington State against Brown for another exhibition.

By the early 1920s the Rose Bowl was becoming synonymous with the best college football had to offer, which would soon be copied with the creation of the Sugar Bowl and Orange Bowl (both in 1935) and the Cotton Bowl (1937). The 1925 game, in particular, had the most hype yet with the Four Horsemen’s final ride for Notre Dame (9-0), which was matched against Stanford (7-0-1).

However, what gained the Rose Bowl its biggest notoriety nationally was one play during the 1929 game, between Georgia Tech (9-0) and California (7-1-1). When Cal center Roy Riegels recovered a fumble, he took off in the wrong direction only to be tackled by his own teammate, Benny Lom, at the 1-yard line.

When Cal was unable to get a first down, Tech’s Vance Maree blocked Lom’s punt, resulting in a safety, but “Wrong-Way Riegels” captured the nation’s attention. Georgia Tech was considered the consensus national champion by most of the ever-growing services raking teams, but a new debate was beginning to take hold, whether or not postseason games should count toward final rankings. At the time, the NCAA was against it.

The First Polls

In the early 1920s, Frank Dickinson, a professor of economics at the University of Illinois, began tinkering with a mathematical formula to rank teams and declare a national champion. In 1926, he unveiled it, and one of the first persons to become enamored with Dickinson’s system was Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne, who asked him to backdate the last two years to 1924 when the Fighting Irish went 10-0 and won the Rose Bowl. With Notre Dame the clear and logical choice, it became the first “scientific” championship in college football.

Dickinson’s formula weighed a team’s wins based on the score and the quality of each opponent. However, while it may been the first official ranking system, and the basis for awarding the Rissman National Trophy and later the Knute Rockne Intercollegiate Memorial Trophy, it wasn’t long before others developed better reputations. For example, in 1925 when nearly every other service that went back to rank teams at season’s end had 10-0 Rose Bowl-winner Alabama No. 1, Dickinson opted for Dartmouth (8-0). It only lasted until 1940.

A number of competing ranking systems were quickly devised and developed, beginning with the Houlgate System (1927-58), a mathematical rating developed by Deke Houlgate of Los Angeles. Like Dickinson, his rankings quickly became popular in newspapers, and also published in the annual Football Thesaurus (1946-58). Houlgate backdated his rankings to at least 1885.

In 1929, they were joined by the Dunkel Index, which is still one of the most respected mathematical ranking systems ever devised, with a formula that has remained unchanged. One of the unique aspects of the numerical ratings was that they could be used to predict the scoring differential of a game. The power index system, created by Dick Dunkel Sr., was one of the computer services used by the Bowl Championship Series (1999-2001) until organizers decided they didn’t want scoring margins to factor into any of the computer calculations. Factoring into the index is strength of schedule, won-loss record, most-recent performances and upsets.

Another longstanding system was created by William Boand in 1930. Known as the Boand System, and/or the Azzi Ratem System, it appeared in newspapers and both the Illustrated Football Annual (1932-42) and Football News (1942-44 and 1951-60), and Boand went back and determined national champions from 1919-29.

The Williamson System, developed by New Orleans geologist Paul Williamson, who would later serve on the Sugar Bowl committee, began in 1932 and was syndicated throughout the South. For years, Williamson was the only system to rank teams and name its national champion after the completion of the bowl schedule.

By the time the Poling System, a mathematical rating system created by former Ohio Wesleyan player Richard Poling and published annually in the Football Review Supplement, came around in 1935 (and lasted until 1984), college football was ready for more bowl games and a significant change that would dramatically alter the national championship landscape, the creation of the Associated Press poll.

A New Age: Newspaper Polls

In 1935, Alan J. Gould, the sports editor of the Associated Press who was described by Time Magazine as a “slight, bow-tied, cigar-chomping newsman,” started ranking his own list of top 10 teams in his weekly column. For the record, his top three that year were Minnesota, Princeton and Southern Methodist. But Gould didn’t clarify a No. 1 team, which didn’t sit well with Minnesota fans, who were otherwise enjoying a consensus national championship (“East Coast Bias!”).

Gould knew he was on to something and in 1936 he created the Associated Press poll, with 44 sportswriters voting that first season. Even though Minnesota lost to Northwestern, 6-0, the Golden Gophers finished No. 1 and were the popular choice ahead of LSU and Pittsburgh.

“It was a case of thinking up ideas to develop interest and controversy between football Saturdays”

“It was a case of thinking up ideas to develop interest and controversy between football Saturdays,” Gould later said. “Papers wanted material to fill space between games. That’s all I had in mind, something to keep the pot boiling. Sports then was living off controversy, opinion, whatever. This was just another exercise in hoopla. Making it a top 10 was an arbitrary decision. It seemed logical to confine it to that number. It was tough enough to pick a top 10 in those days, let alone 15 or 20.”

The Associated Press (or AP) poll, the first based solely on opinion, immediately became the foremost rankings in college football, and the most widely circulated. With the championship, a trophy has traditionally been awarded. In 1947, Notre Dame retired the Williams Trophy, which had been named after Minnesota coach Henry Williams and sponsored by the M Club of Minnesota. In 1956, Oklahoma retired the Reverend Hugh O’Donnell Trophy, named for the Notre Dame president and sponsored by Notre Dame alumni. The award was known as the AP Trophy from 1957-83, when it was renamed the Paul Bear Bryant Trophy.

The Associated Press poll has had two important fluctuations, the number of teams ranked and whether the final poll should be held before or after bowl games. Gould’s first poll ranked 20 teams, but from 1962-67 only ten were listed. It finally expanded to 25 teams in 1989.

As for the postseason, bowl games were still essentially considered exhibitions, so the NCAA encouraged any final polling to take place at the end of the regular season. One notable exception occurred at the end of the 1947 season when Notre Dame didn’t play in a bowl game and Michigan accepted an invitation to play No. 8 Southern California in the Rose Bowl. After the Wolverines won, 49-0, a special poll was conducted and voters changed their minds, selecting Michigan No. 1. However, the poll didn’t supersede the final regular season poll.

In 1950, United Press news service, which was in direct competition with the Associated Press, decided it needed a poll of its own and created the coaches’ poll, with 35 participants. Although United Press merged with International News Service (which had its own poll from 1952-57), becoming United Press International, the coaches’ poll continues to exist today as the Amway Coaches Poll (FYI, from 1982-96, it was the USA Today/CNN poll, followed by the USA Today/ESPN poll).

Naturally, that first year with two major polls resulted in a controversy, but not a split title. Both had Oklahoma No. 1 at the end of the regular season, but the Sooners subsequently lost to Paul W. “Bear” Bryant’s Kentucky Wildcats in the Sugar Bowl, 13-7. It only took four years for the polls to select different champions. In 1954, the Associated Press sided with Ohio State, while the coaches’ poll preferred UCLA.

The first time a bowl game featured a No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup was 1962, one year after Ohio State’s faculty council voted 28–25 to turn down a Rose Bowl invitation, citing its discomfort with the school’s overemphasis on sports. No. 2 Wisconsin scored three touchdowns and a safety in the fourth quarter to make a massive comeback against No. 1 Southern California, but ran out of time, 42-37. The following year also saw No. 1 play No. 2 in a bowl game, with top-ranked Texas defeating Navy and Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Roger Staubach, 28-6.

By 1964, the thinking that bowl games should only be considered exhibitions was changing. At the conclusion of the regular season, Alabama and Arkansas were both undefeated and both polls had the Crimson Tide No. 1. But after Arkansas defeated Nebraska in the Cotton Bowl, Alabama lost to Texas in the Orange Bowl.

The following year, the Associated Press pushed its final voting back until after the bowl schedule. At the end of the regular season, Michigan State (10-0), Arkansas (10-0) and Nebraska (10-0) were all undefeated, and UPI went ahead and crowed the Spartans its champion. Meanwhile, Bryant’s Alabama team was No. 4 at 8-1-1, with its lone loss in the season-opener to Georgia considered controversial. When he figured out that there was still a way to finish No. 1 in the Associated Press poll and claim the national championship, the Crimson Tide turned down an invitation from the Cotton Bowl to face No. 3 Nebraska in the Orange Bowl.

When Michigan State lost to No. 5 UCLA in the Rose Bowl, 14-12, and Arkansas lost to LSU in the Cotton Bowl, 14-7, the Tide had its chance. Despite facing a much-bigger team, Alabama outgained Nebraska 518 to 377 yards to pull out an amazing 39-28 victory and defend its opportunistic, albeit controversial, title.

Due to pressure, the Associated Press went back to voting before the bowl games for two more years, before making the change permanent. The coaches stubbornly held out until after the 1973 season, when No. 1 Alabama (10-0), already named the UPI’s national champion, lost to No. 3 Notre Dame (10-0) in the Sugar Bowl, 24-23.

The Bowl Championship Series

In 1984, the entire landscape of college football became primed for major change thanks to what was symbolically an end zone spike by the United States Supreme Court.

In NCAA v. Board of Regents of University of Oklahoma and Georgia Athletic Association, the court was asked by the NCAA to overturn rulings made at the District Court and Court of Appeals levels that said the parent organization couldn’t limit the number of televised football games. The litigation was triggered by the NCAA’s response by the College Football Association, an organization of the more dominant football-playing schools and conferences, to develop an independent television plan (and in the process make a lot more money).

If this doesn’t sound like a big deal, consider that cable television was still a relatively new concept at the time and college football was all but limited to a handful of games each weekend, if that.

The Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA was essentially regulating free trade, performing illegal price fixing and “restricted rather than enhanced the place of intercollegiate athletics in the Nation’s life.” In the process, the court also rejected the NCAA’s arguments that widespread broadcasts could curtail live attendance and that competition on the airwaves would be bad for the game.

The deregulation sent every conference into a tizzy, looking for ways to maximize the financial potential. However, nearly all were already locked into a pre-existing bowl agreement, like the champions of the Big Ten and Pac-10 meeting every year at the Rose Bowl. The same year as the Supreme Court’s ruling, No. 6 Ohio State played No. 18 Southern California in Pasadena, while the national championship came down to whether or not surprise No. 1 Brigham Young could defeat unranked Michigan in the Holiday Bowl (it did, 24-17).

It led to the era of superconferences, and eventually the Bowl Championships Series. At about the time the first of the big independents joined a conference, Penn State with the Big Ten in 1990, SEC commissioner Roy Kramer realized that his 10-school league could take advantage of a loophole in NCAA rules to create an extra revenue-enhancing championship game, but in order to do so needed a membership of at least 12 teams. Arkansas jumped at the opportunity, which simultaneously served as a deathblow to the troubled Southwest Conference, and was later joined by South Carolina.

Instead of adhering to a television contract extension with ABC and ESPN, negotiated by the College Football Association, the SEC signed a landmark five-year, $85 million deal with CBS, which had just lost the National Football League to Fox. Days later, the Atlantic Coast Conference signed an $80 million deal with ABC and ESPN, and CBS quickly added the Big East, which formed in 1991, for $75 million including basketball games. Florida State signed on with the ACC and Miami with the Big East (but later jumped to the ACC with Boston College and Virginia Tech).

But college football had another, lingering problem, the championship. Over the previous 29 years, there had only been eight bowl games matching teams ranked first and second, with growing concern that Congress might soon intervene should some sort of playoff system not be implemented.

One of the fathers, if not the father, of the Bowl Championships Series was ACC executive Tim Mickle, who supposedly one day started scribbling down ideas for a new bowl format on a restaurant napkin. It grew into rotating a championship game between the major bowls. Among those instrumental in getting the major bowls to actually agree to it was Kramer.

Although it’s been a financial windfall for all involved, it should be noted that Mickle’s original intention was to move the bowl system a step closer to a playoff system, and in the meantime establish the potential for No. 1 to play No. 2 every year.

“Maybe I should have kept it to myself,” Mickle told writer John Feinstein years later, after school presidents in the bigger conferences used the BCS as a preemptive strike and excuse for not creating a playoff. By doing so, not only did they stay in control of the sport, but strengthen their grip on football revenues and bowl payouts so they wouldn’t be equally distributed among the entire NCAA membership.

Which brings us to today. Although the BCS was continually tweaked, with a formula used to determine the two teams in the national championship game and the pecking order for the participants in the major bowls, it largely met the original intent of annually pairing the two top teams in a title matchup.

With the conference landscape continuing to shift and pressure continuing to build for a playoff, the critical juncture occurred in 2012 — fresh off the all-SEC West title game between Alabama at LSU. With the BCS television contracts due to expire and the potential for a huge financial windfall, a series of extensive meetings led to the creation of the four-team playoff with the teams determined by a 13-person selection committee.

The average revenue of the playoff is estimated to be about $500 million annually, 75 percent of which will be split by the schools making up the “Power Five” conferences

EPSN subsequently paid $7.3 billion over 12 years to show the title game, semifinals and four major bowl games every year. The average revenue of the playoff was estimated to be about $500 million annually, 75 percent of which to be split by the schools making up the “Power Five” conferences (ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC).

Consequently, Division I football stopped being the only division in any NCAA sport that didn’t have a tournament of some sort at the end of its season. Along the long road Michigan State coach Duffy Daugherty became an advocate for a playoff after the controversial ending to the 1966 season, and in 1975 the NCAA appointed a 17-member Division I Football Championship Feasibility Committee. A vote was never held on its proposal for a four-team playoff.

There were also scores of compromises along the way in an effort to maintain the established revenue streams and preserve the bowl system. Among them was adding the 12th regular-season game so schools not playing in a league with a conference championship could have the money from an extra home game.

“Well, I don’t have to worry about that playoff any more,” South Carolina’s Steve Spurrier said in 2006, after the SEC won the first of an unprecedented seven national titles. “I do think it is tougher for the top SEC teams to be one of the final two. It’s tougher. It can be done. Heck, we’ve proven it can be done. I was reading something in the local paper here that in ’92, of course, Alabama won it all going through the championship game. Of course, Tennessee did it one year. We did it one year.

“It can happen. But it is difficult. It is difficult with so many top SEC teams, whereas all the other sports, I mean, men’s basketball national champ, Florida Gators, South Carolina beat them twice, Tennessee beat them twice, but that’s the regular season. End of the season, the Florida Gators were by far the best team in the country. That’s sort of how sports is if you have a tournament and playoff system.

“Since we don’t have that, a lot of it has to do with scheduling, voting instead of determining it on the field. But that’s the way college football seems to want to do it. The presidents and athletic directors and commissioners, that’s just the way they want to do it. I remember Commissioner Kramer was here back in about ’90. I said, ‘Why do you want a playoff for the SEC championship but you don’t want one for the national?’ He just looked at me funny. He couldn’t answer it either. He didn’t have the answer for that one.”