College Football Playoff Counterfactuals: Who would win after World War II?

College football returned full force after World War II. What if a playoff existed in 1946? Keep reading for Part 2 of our Playoff Counterfactuals series.

In a recent Sunday Morning Quarterback column, we looked at March Madness in college basketball and how a larger playoff would impact college football. Over the next few weeks, we will be drawing upon that concept with a series of counterfactual thought experiments. The basic premise is simple: What if a playoff existed in a given year? Tune in each day as we look at how a playoff would have impacted landmark seasons in college football history.

World War II did not entirely end college football in the United States, but the war seriously diminished the quality of play. As more and more young men were conscripted into the efforts overseas, rosters were depleted across the country.

With the end of the war in 1945, however, soldiers started returning to civilian life. For many, that meant the resumption of collegiate studies. Football teams began to regain their top talent at schools around the nation. By 1946, the first full season with programs back at full strength, football was once again filling the role as proxy battlefield instead of the real thing from which many players had recently returned.

What if those soldiers had returned to a college football world that included a playoff?

As we talked about in the first installment of this series, the AP Poll only came into existence a decade earlier. After fighting for freedom, what if these student-athletes returned to a world where they could compete on a fair playing field for the national championship?

At this point, the national title was not nearly as significant as it is in the 21st century. But football was most definitely a national sport, and its appeal in the postwar period escalated exponentially. Part of that was due to the growth of the NFL, but in 1946 college football was still king.

1946 provided another great flashpoint for implementing a 16-team playoff to determine the top team in the country. Coming back from fronts across both the Atlantic and the Pacific, players instead played for a mythic crown distributed by a variety of pollsters and statistical measurements. Keep reading for the biggest challenges and biggest opportunities that were both avoided as football went seven more decades after World War II without a playoff.