SMQ: The value of NOT having one definitive national champion

With the crowning of the HBCU national champion and the FCS semifinals this weekend, let’s look at the value of NOT having just one national championship.

This time of year invariably brings up a lot of discussion about playoff systems and championships and who is “the” champion. Often this topic hinges on the top division of the sport, as the FBS has been grappling with the dilemma of how to crown the king of the year.

From the Bowl Coalition to the Bowl Alliance to the BCS to the College Football Playoff, every successive effort has been an attempt to refine the system so that there is no doubt about the legitimacy of each season’s champion within that system.

The problem with each has always been that, within a variegated system that lacks a single sanctioned champion, there is no way to completely eliminate doubt. The split national championships that preceded the Bowl Coalition and persisted on through the Bowl Alliance did not go away once the Big Ten and Pac-10 were brought into the fold.

There was the case of undefeated USC in 2003, and Auburn in 2004, and most recently UCF in 2017. In a system where power is at once concentrated among a small cabal of teams and simultaneously decentralized, there is no way to reward every exemplary team in a given season.

The futility of a system like the College Football Playoff is laid bare when one takes that reality into account. What the bowl system has always recognized is that it would be folly to provide only one pathway to a reward for a well-played season. They also provide the opportunity to shift the script and get a last-minute change of heart, as the generous range of publications and rating systems accepted by the NCAA as legitimate allow a range of seasons to claim national championships.

Even at the lower subdivision, there is no single answer.

And frankly, we should embrace that diversity of opinion. Claiming to have the answers in a system with so many variables is folly. We see this at the FCS level as well, where three conferences have opted out of the FCS playoff and forged their own path.

The Celebration Bowl features a duel between the champions of the MEAC and the SWAC, two conferences comprised of historical black colleges and universities. Prior to 2015, both conferences received an automatic bid into the NCAA Division I football tournament. Once the opportunity to form an HBCU national championship was on the table, the appeal of a longshot run at one national championship became less appealing than the sure opportunity for a different type of national title.

That appeal went beyond the $1 million allocated to each conference on an annual basis for participating in the only FCS bowl game on the postseason calendar. While the league still makes its other teams available for at-large selection into the FCS playoffs, the champions are off-limits as they prepare for a head-to-head showdown for a different prize with precedents in previous attempts to create an HBCU national championship.

Choosing the Celebration Bowl over the FCS playoffs allows the SWAC and the MEAC to control their own historical narrative. Instead of leaving the storyline at the whim of other leagues or an institution like the NCAA, the two HBCU conferences have the opportunity to forge their own history.

Similarly, sometimes the desire to manufacture a single champion becomes less appealing than maintaining that control. Though the Ivy League elected to move down to the lower subdivision when Division I split in the late 1970s, they did so with the understanding that their eight-team league would opt out of the national tournament in football.

In this way, they get to control a narrative of being above the fray and upholding a bygone ethos of what should be valued in intercollegiate sport. It is a fictive ethos, especially considering the sometimes sordid history of football at schools like Yale and Harvard long before the Ivy League was officially codified as a conference.

What does this mean for the FBS and the future of a playoff?

Even if the College Football Playoff does expand, it would be foolish to consider that tournament as the sole determinant of national championships. Especially if there is no pathway for every FBS conference to enter (or choose to not enter) the I-A tournament, there is no way to definitively say that the winner of the bracket is the undisputed champion.

That certainly is no justification to maintain the status quo and never consider growing from four teams. But, like HBCU conferences and the Ivy League discovered for themselves, there isn’t necessarily inherent value in going with the herd.

Keeping open the right for individual leagues to choose a range of options that work best for their member schools will always be the most reasonable choice for dealing with participants in intercollegiate football competition whose interests don’t always align.

For a range of different reasons both contemporary and historical, there has never been and will never be a one-size-fits-all solution for determining what works best for a conference no matter which level they inhabit.