wmcovol
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Thats correct just like AP didnt give Alabama any of their claimed national championships before 1961.
True. But various non-math organizations did. Pre-AP titles are certainly up for debate. But as long as human beings determined that a team deserved a national title, I'm okay with anyone who wants to claim it. If a spreadsheet determined it? Nope.
There was bias in the math systems, too. Dickinson was the first math system that was widely published, and he'd often tweak the numbers to avoid crowning a Southern team.
That's a great point and one that pretty often gets overlooked. "SEC bias" has only really been a thing since the late 2000s, when it clearly became the superior conference and rattled off that streak of consecutive national titles. Before that, there was a pretty clear media bias towards the upper midwestern teams (Michigan, Ohio St, Notre Dame).there was a lot of bias against southern teams right up until the BCS in 1998.
People care about titles before the 80s because we care more about national titles today than they did back in the day. Hence we'll look back into the 80s, 70s, 60s, etc., see who the pollsters said was #1, and rank programs/coaches based on that. Winning a national title back then wasn't a big of a deal then as it is today. It isn't necessarily what a team was shooting for. There was a time where college football looked at a national title like a high school team would. High school football is about state championships. If somebody wants to rank all the high school teams in the country in a poll, that's cool if they pick you #1, but ultimately it doesn't really mean a whole lot. What they really want to win, and what the really measure success by, is winning a state championship.I don't know why anyone really even cares that much about NCs before around the 80s anyway. I mean people can crap on the Bowl Coalition, BCS and Playoffs all they want, but at least it's an attempt to actually crown an NC through a process, however flawed they might be. I'll take that over hoping just maybe #1 and #2 meet in a bowl game..