Ranking the 30 Greatest National Championship Games

Over college football’s long history, there have been 30 definitive national championship games. Here is how we rank each performance.

College football only set up the mechanisms to guarantee that the top two teams would face one another in a national championship game over the past 25 years. And even then, determining which two teams are the best two has often been a matter of debate.

Every era has had its own methods by which we can say a team was the national champion. Leading up to the BCS era, it was always an inexact science and the top two teams in the AP poll rarely faced off against one another in a decisive showdown. The eight rare occasions that it did occur between the early 1960s and late 1980s were gems that offered fans a definitive answer at the end of the season.

The first attempts to rectify the uncertainty came in 1992, when the Bowl Coalition managed to pair #1 Miami against #2 Alabama in the 1993 Sugar Bowl. But without the Pac-10 and Big Ten in the mix, the Bowl Coalition and its successor Bowl Alliance only succeeded in pairing the top two teams against one another in three of their six combined seasons of existence.

Since the introduction of the Bowl Championship Series in the 1998-1999 season, there has been one game in which a (mostly) undisputed national champion has been crowned. The College Football Playoff plus-one system replaced the BCS three years ago.

In total, we have received a solid answer just 30 times. We’ve evaluated each game using a combination of College Football Reference’s SRS scores for each of the 60 teams and the results of the games. (To learn more about the methodology and see a Google spreadsheet of the calculations, click through to the final slide.) Here is how each of the 30 national championship games have stacked up over the past 50-plus years at the top level of modern college football history.