College Football National Champions By Year

College football fans love to count championships, so I dug through the annals of history and compiled a list of every national champion to ever grace the sport.

You might not find college football odds for all these seasons, but at least there’s a semi-definitive list of champions to argue about. 

College Football National Champions By Year

College Football National Championship History

College football might crown its modern champions via an exciting single-elimination tournament, but the historical processes that predated the playoff model are quite a bit weirder.

From 1998-2013, a computer algorithm drove the BCS system, declaring at the end of the season which two teams had the right to play for a championship. The system utilized the Coaches Poll, the Harris Poll, and several other mathematical models.

In the decades before 1998, the Associated Press voted for a national champion at the end of the year. Teams that were highly ranked and playing in a prominent bowl game like the Rose Bowl or Cotton Bowl, had a decent chance to be magically named the national champion. 

Prior to 1936, there wasn’t much of a culture of naming a national champion at all. However, it’s become a passion project for some technically inclined college football enthusiasts to return to the late 19th- and early 20th-century record books and apply modern analytics to retroactively name a national champion for each and every season of yore.