This tale is better than earlier myths
THERE have been bad ways to determine a national champion in college football. In 1969, for instance, Texas beat Arkansas in what was called the “Game of the Century,” and it was a terrific game, the Longhorns scoring 15 unanswered fourth-quarter points to secure a one-point win in a hostile environment in Fayetteville, Ark., No. 1 taking the best No. 2 could offer, surviving.
A special guest that day at Razorback Stadium was Ri c h a rd Ni xo n , who was not only a huge football fan but also happened to be President of the United States. Nixon had brought a small plaque to the game with him which he delivered to Darrell Royal afterward, declaring Texas the national champions, even before they could defeat Notre Dame in the Cotton Bowl a month later.
That was always a bone of contention for Joe Paterno, whose Penn State team went undefeated that year and declined an invite to the Cotton Bowl because of segregation issues in Dallas. Four years later, at a university commencement, Paterno (a staunch conservative) would gleefully state, “How could Nixon know so much about college football in 1969 and so little about Watergate in 1973?”
That was always the season around which so many rally cries were based, about the unfairness of the old college system. And heck: It used to be even sillier. Time was, the wire services would declare their national champions BEFORE the bowl games were ever played. Alabama, in fact, won two mythical titles this way: 1964 (both AP and UPI) and ’73 (UPI; AP by that time realized the silliness of that philosophy, so it went with Notre Dame).
And, yes, even the advent of the BCS didn’t eliminate all confusion at the end; in 2002 LSU won the BCS (and the coaches poll, which by then had moved to USA Today’s purview) while USC won the writers poll at AP.
All of these things were decidedly untidy, and we are nothing if not a sporting society that likes tidy. We in the United States would never tolerate the way the Premiership settles upon a football champion in the UK; one ultra-meaningful regular season and not one playoff game.
There were some — and it was a distinct minority — and I was one of them, for whatever it’s worth — who used to like things just fine the way they were, when the season would play out, the bowls would play out, and sometimes as many as four teams would lay claim to the national title because that’s just the way it worked out. In 1964, no fewer than four teams — Alabama, Arkansas, Michigan, Notre Dame — lay claim to some or other version of a sanctioned-body title.
In those days, because you couldn’t settle the argument on a field of play, it was always settled in a saloon, or beside a water cooler, or even by a swimming pool months later; as long as there is indecision, debate will follow, often forever. But that was a lonely opinion.
So we have now what it seems we’ve always wanted. We have two teams, Oregon and Ohio State, who not only survived the 12-week gauntlet, who not only made statements with conference-title victories, but also arrive as the first-ever winners of national semifinals. Funny, too: Under the old system, there’s at least a chance that this would be a consolation-round matchup (which is to say, it never would’ve happened at all) because Alabama surely would have been one BCS team and an undefeated Florida State almost certainly would have gotten the other bid.
We also have a wonderful, historical quirk: Oregon and Ohio State were also the two universities who contested the first-ever NCAA basketball championship back in 1939 (Oregon won, 46-33) and now, almost 76 years later, those two schools will launch the brave new world of honest-to-goodness, no-doubt NCAA football championship play.
The system isn’t perfect (ask any Horned Frog of TCU fan you know), and maybe one of these days we’ll have an eight-game playoff to keep everyone reasonably satisfied. But for now, and for Monday night, we have as close to a consensus as we ever will that the two best teams of 2014 will have at it for the right to own a title that has always been leased. National champion.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com