Since the advent of polls, there have been 33 college football teams before 2017 that lost a national championship game. How did they fare the following season?
The country woke up this Sunday on the first weekend of the college football offseason. With Alabama’s overtime win over Georgia in the College Football Playoff National Championship, the national titles have been decided at every level of the collegiate game. That leaves time for a Sunday Morning Quarterback to look forward and look back.
Georgia missed its shot at the school’s first national championship since 1980. Now they have months to think about what might have been, as they coughed up a 20-7 lead that remained in double digits entering the fourth quarter and fell in overtime.
The past two teams to lose in the College Football Playoff title game went on to win the championship the following year. Georgia will hope to make it three years in a row when they get back on the field in 2018.
But how common is it for losing finalists to win it all the next year?
The problem for this exercise is determining what constituted a national title game.For the purposes of this exercise, we are going to look at four distinct eras for the sport.
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After the introduction of the AP Poll in 1936, a quarter-century passed before the first meeting of No. 1 against No. 2 in a bowl game. Big Ten champion Wisconsin, ranked second in the country to end the 1962 season, squared off against top-ranked USC in the 1963 Rose Bowl. The Trojans held off a furious Badgers comeback bid to win 42-37 and validate their No. 1 ranking at a time when there was no poll released after the bowl games.
Since then there have been 32 other times when teams have fallen in a game that would have tipped the national title in their favor. The period from that Rose Bowl game between the Badgers and Trojans until the 1991-1992 postseason marks the first era.
The poll era was marked by several instances of split national championships. There were still opportunities for a team like BYU to finish No. 1 in the country. It was a wild time where sometimes three or even four teams can claim the same year’s national championship and have some measure of legitimacy behind the claim.
At the start of the 1990s, two straight seasons ended with split national championships. The AP selected Colorado in 1990, while the Coaches Poll chose Georgia Tech as its national champion. The following year, the AP tabbed Miami and the coaches picked Washington.
Thus began several attempts to guarantee a definitive title game annually.
Beginning in 1992, the Bowl Coalition and Bowl Alliance commenced attempts to bring together a definitive matchup of the top two teams at the end of the regular season. Those two setups faltered for several reasons. First, the Rose Bowl decided to stay outside the two groups, remaining defiantly independent for the bulk of the 1990s.
That meant that neither the Big Ten nor Pac-10 champions were in the mix to play in that national championship game arranged by the Coalition and then the Alliance. The issue came to a head in 1997, when the Bowl Alliance paired No. 2 Nebraska against No. 3 Tennessee in the Orange Bowl.
The Cornhuskers took down the Volunteers 42-17 and won the crystal pigskin handed out by the coaches. But top-ranked Michigan beat Pac-10 co-champion Washington State in the Rose Bowl and held on to the No. 1 spot in the AP Top 25.
By 1998, the Rose Bowl had been brought into the fold. The Big Ten and Pac-10 joined the SEC, Big 12, ACC, and Big East in the Bowl Championship Series. For 16 years the BCS dominated the proceedings, with the SEC especially gaining a position of primacy within the sport. The top two teams were matched every season as determined by an unfixed algorithm combining human polls and computer rankings.
But only two teams had a shot at the national title, drawing cries to expand the field into a plus-one situation where the top four teams played a two-round playoff. In 2014, that dream came to fruition with the formation of the College Football Playoff.
That means 33 teams before Georgia have lost a title shot.
How have those 33 teams fared? Let’s look at the various tiers of losing finalists based on their performance in the ensuing season. Four clear splits are identifiable between these 33 teams.
One group went from losing a shot at the national championship in one year to finish No. 1 the next year. The second group is comprised of those teams that didn’t get up to one of the top two spots in the rankings but still won at least 10 games and remained in the single digits of the rankings.
A third set of teams dropped off in performance slightly. These were the teams that failed to get to double digits but were still good enough to win somewhere around eight or nine games and remain in the AP Top 25 at the end of the season. The last group consists of those that went from a national championship shot to unranked the following campaign.
Which group will Georgia fall into when they take the field in 2018? Let’s first break down the various types of losing finalists and see where the Bulldogs might fit in this week’s Sunday Morning Quarterback.