It’s really hard to win a college football national championship. Now imagine winning four – all in one day. That’s technically what just happened for Auburn, who have just claimed four additional college football national titles, bringing their full total to nine. Not long ago, it was only considered two, in 1957 and 2010. In those years, the Tigers were ranked first by AP Poll and in the NCAA Record Book, in addition to the BCS in 2010.
In three other cases, they had been recognized by the Record Book for topping particular rankings, like the Sagarin statistical ranking in 1983 or the Margin of Victory in 1913. That also included one year when Auburn was on probation and wasn’t allowed to play in a bowl game but still went undefeated. Those three were already quietly counted in the Auburn media guide. But now, the University is going ahead full stop to proudly include four more, including a year when the eventual national champion USC later lost their title to a rules infraction, so Auburn has decided they were the next best finisher despite not having played the Trojans at year’s end.
There’s logic to each one of the decisions, but I’d say it’s a pretty far reaching collective stretch to somehow translate this into nine official national titles. But agree or not, banners will be raised in Jordan Hare Stadium on the Plains, making it as official as any Auburn fan would want it to be.
To be fair, the whole concept of a football national champion was historically pretty ambiguous, as there were a whole lot of teams that never played each other and no playoff system that essentially gave legitimate contenders a chance to win it on the field. For the better part of football history, teams were slotted into bowl games based on conference affiliation and a group of sports writers would essentially pick the best team at the end of the year. Which meant that national champ was a much a beauty pageant as an earned sports title.
In rare cases you’d have an obvious best in class. But in most years, it was conjecture about whether a one loss team who played a tough schedule was better than an undefeated team from a lesser conference, or something like that. It wasn’t until 1998 when something called the BCS attempted to statistically bring the best two teams in the country together for a title game, and not until 2014 when that was expanded to a four-team playoff. That playoff is now 12 teams and growing, leaving us at a place where we can, with some degree of certainty, say that the national champion is, in fact, the national champion.
That reality is what led Auburn to exponentially expand their dominance from two to nine without ever taking the field. To their credit, Auburn isn’t suggesting that they are the exclusive national champ. Rather, they are one of the teams that should be recognized as champion. There could, and clearly are others in that age of ambiguity. It should also be noted that there are still a whole lot of “national champions” that are awarded by some kind of highly questionable selection process. Like pretty much any high school national title is useless. There’s like 25,000 high schools in the US, and hundreds upon hundreds that play school sports at the highest level. There’s literally no way to know whether Bishop Gorman in Nevada is better than Duncanville in Texas, although not surprisingly more and more these overgrown high school teams are playing a national schedule, which is a whole other issue. But to give one a definitive trophy is like calling Hotel California the greatest rock song ever. It just doesn’t make sense.
And maybe that’s the point here. Regardless of how you get there, the whole concept of champion is contextual. Even something as seemingly objective as say, the NCAA basketball tournament, which lets 68 teams play it out for one shining moment, even that is dependent on which teams are chosen, what schedules they got to play all season, who got sent to which site, and so on and so on. And if the tournament was 16 teams instead of over 60, we’d most likely have a different, but equally justifiable winner. Because winning a title doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens through the socially constructed space of human sport.
Which means that while I don’t believe that Auburn actually won nine titles, I don’t know that it’s two either. But at the very least, the last four came pretty easy.
Keith Strudler is the Dean of the College of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler.
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