College Football Playoff: Who would win it all in 1951?

Nine teams went unbeaten in the 1951 regular season, but the only postseason loser of the five won the national title. Here is how a playoff would have improved the situation.

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.

The 1951 season saw nine different teams finish the regular season undefeated. Only four of them played in bowl games, though, at a time when postseason berths were a rarity. And the team picked No. 1 ended up losing its bowl game to another undefeated school.

College football still hadn’t come together completely around the concept of deciding national championships on the field. 1951 fell 11 years before the first-ever meeting of No. 1 and No. 2 teams in a bowl game.

It was pure chaos at a time when US society was emerging into a postwar sense of order. Undefeated SEC winner Tennessee was named the national champion for a second straight season. They then fell 28-13 to Southern Conference champion Maryland in the Sugar Bowl. The Volunteers were the only team of the unbeaten quintet to lose in the postseason.

At that time, though, the final polls came before the postseason.

Despite finishing the year by doubling up the score on the top team in the country, the Terrapins had no shot of moving up to No. 1 in the country. They weren’t the only ones with a grievance, though. No. 4 Illinois beat 9-1-0 PCC champion Stanford in the Rose Bowl to finish the year unbeaten. No. 5 Georgia Tech took down 8-1-1 Baylor in the Orange Bowl to also end the 1951 season without a defeat.

And No. 2 Michigan State, still independent at the time, missed out on a bowl game altogether. They too ended the year with a perfect record but no shot at the national title. Princeton also finished the year undefeated, as did a couple of smaller schools like San Diego State and San Francisco. The latter of the California schools put up a perfect record in the final year of Dons football before the program folded.

What if 1951 featured a playoff? Fifteen years after the first national polls came out, and five years after the end of World War II, 1951 offered another crossroads for college football. Here are the challenges and opportunities that a 16-team playoff would have presented in this season.

Would San Francisco still be playing college football? Would another team overtake Tennessee for the national title? Keep reading as we dive deeper into the concept of a 16-team playoff in 1951 in the newest installment of Playoff Counterfactuals.