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Ranking the 30 Greatest National Championship Games

By Zach Bigalke

Jan 12, 2015; Arlington, TX, USA; Ohio State Buckeyes running back Ezekiel Elliott (15) is tackled short of the goal line by Oregon Ducks defensive lineman DeForest Buckner (44) in the fourth quarter in the 2015 CFP National Championship Game at AT&T Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Matthew Emmons-USA TODAY Sports
Jan 12, 2015; Arlington, TX, USA; Ohio State Buckeyes running back Ezekiel Elliott (15) is tackled short of the goal line by Oregon Ducks defensive lineman DeForest Buckner (44) in the fourth quarter in the 2015 CFP National Championship Game at AT&T Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Matthew Emmons-USA TODAY Sports /
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Sep 5, 2016; Orlando, FL, USA; The AFCA Coaches Trophy presented by Amway, prior to kickoff of Florida State Seminoles and Mississippi Rebels. The Waterford Crystal Football will be presented to the No. 1 team in the Amway Coaches Poll and national champion at the end of the season. It has been awarded to the Coaches National Champion since 1986 and made available to all Coaches Poll winners since 1950. Mandatory Credit: Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports
Sep 5, 2016; Orlando, FL, USA; The AFCA Coaches Trophy presented by Amway, prior to kickoff of Florida State Seminoles and Mississippi Rebels. The Waterford Crystal Football will be presented to the No. 1 team in the Amway Coaches Poll and national champion at the end of the season. It has been awarded to the Coaches National Champion since 1986 and made available to all Coaches Poll winners since 1950. Mandatory Credit: Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports /

Explaining Methodology Behind Championship Rankings

As mentioned briefly in the introduction, these rankings are an attempt to take a more measured approach toward remembering and ranking the greatest championship games from across over five decades of history. By no means is any ranking going to be perfectly objective, but what we have done is work from a few critical points of statistical analysis to try to avoid such issues as recency bias.

Before explaining how the rankings were calculated, here is the spreadsheet of data from which everything you have read is based:

The key columns for calculation purposes are as follows:

  • WP = Winning Points
  • LP = Losing Points
  • MOV = Margin of Victory
  • W/SRS = Winner’s SRS score from College Football Reference
  • L/SRS = Loser’s SRS score from College Football Reference
  • UPSET = Gap between W/SRS and L/SRS to determine favorite/underdog success rate
  • SRS VALUE = SRS of both participants combined with Upset value
  • SCORING = Percentage valuation of competitiveness based on Margin of Victory

More from College Football News

The final score is determined by multiplying the SRS Value with the Scoring component. Closer games are given more weight than blowouts under this method. SRS is a normalizing metric that allows for weighting the quality of teams across disparate periods of time. As such it was utilized here as a means of comparing games from the three decades when polls alone determined whether a game pitted number one versus number two; the first attempts to create an annual championship under the Bowl Coalition and Bowl Alliance system; the shifting calculations of the Bowl Championship Series era; and the modern plus-one model of the College Football Playoff.

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