Featured Matchups
Who actually won the national championship?
69of 156 seasons have more than one champion.
College football never had one champion for most of its existence. Every claim since 1869 is here: the split titles, the disputed ones, the vacated ones, and who named whom.
Most titles
- Yale18/ 0 claimed
- Alabama16/ 18 claimed
- Princeton15/ 0 claimed
- Notre Dame13/ 11 claimed
- Michigan10/ 12 claimed
The arguments
- 2003
LSU wins the BCS title game over Oklahoma while the AP writers and the FWAA crown USC, which the BCS formula left out of the Sugar Bowl despite its No. 1 human-poll ranking, the last split championship of the BCS era.
- 2004
USC goes 13-0 and sweeps every selector, but the BCS strips the title in 2011 over the Reggie Bush ineligibility case while the AP lets its championship stand and undefeated Auburn presses its own claim.
- 2017
Alabama wins the College Football Playoff title in overtime over Georgia while 13-0 UCF, left out of the playoff, declares itself national champion on the strength of a Peach Bowl win over Auburn and a No. 1 Colley Matrix ranking.
- 1997
Michigan takes the AP, FWAA, and NFF titles after a 12-0 Rose Bowl season while the coaches vault 13-0 Nebraska to No. 1 in the USA Today/ESPN poll in Tom Osborne's farewell game, the split that pushes the sport into the BCS the next season.
