College Football Playoff: What if a 16-team playoff was launched in 1936?

A playoff in 1936 would radically alter course of college football history

Imagine what the past eight decades of college football history would look like if football had joined other intercollegiate sports in forming championship playoffs. Other than the Rose Bowl, postseason bowl games were only just beginning to take form on the annual calendar. They were not yet a tradition that could hinder the evolution of a different type of postseason.

At that point, the Rose Bowl might have evolved into a permanent site for the championship game as the Olympia of college football. Perhaps cities like New Orleans and El Paso and Miami would bid for rights to host semifinal games, but the Granddaddy of ’em All would have served a natural function as the venue for the climax and catharsis of a multi-round playoff following a spirited regular season.

We likely would still have seen divisional splits in the sport. With the incessant quarrels about eligibility, recruiting, and scholarships that marked relations between institutions with divergent ideas of what constituted acceptable behavior, no single playoff was going to permanently serve a full range of institutions across the country.

But Division I might not have split into two subdivisions in the late 1970s with a playoff. Perhaps more schools like the Ivy League institutions would have remained in the sport. Or, given the prevalence of strong independent teams in that era, the significance of conference affiliation would not have been tied to the playoff itself.

What if a true meritocracy had ballooned out of this moment in history?

The 1936 postseason featured six bowl games. One team in all six bowl games was an independent school. The other slots were filled by a mix of conference champs and other fortunate schools.

Much like the modern era, the SEC dominated the postseason discussion with three teams out of the dozen. SEC champion LSU squared off against Santa Clara in the Sugar Bowl. Mississippi State lost to Duquesne, while Auburn tied 7-7 against Villanova in Havana, Cuba.

PCC champion Washington took on Pitt in the Rose Bowl, falling 21-0 to the Panthers in a clash of top-five teams from the first end-of-season AP poll in history. SWC runner-up TCU took down top-20 Marquette in the first-ever Cotton Bowl. Then there was Texas Mines, which had finished behind Arizona in the Border standings and was rewarded with a rout by Hardin-Simmons on the Miners’ home turf in El Paso.

Had a playoff existed, some of these teams would have played in the postseason. Some, however, would have been at home for the holidays instead of dreaming of national championships. 1936 set a major precedent in terms of establishing bowls as a reward structure that is inexact at best and wracked with favoritism at its core.