North Dakota State Wins NCAA Division I Football Championship

NDSU defeated Illinois State 29-27 in the NCAA D-I title game just outside of Dallas. This playoff run for the Bison makes for their fourth consecutive championship, making NDSU the first school to do so. Wait – you thought we were talking about Monday night? That’s not an NCAA championship: that’s a bowl game sanctioned by the NCAA, which awards a “College Football Playoff National Champion.” The NCAA has never awarded a national championship at its top flight.

So how the hell does that work? Well, the NCAA never awarded a national football champion after its founding in the early 1900s. For the next seventy years, national titles were awarded by press syndicates, individual magazines and newspapers, and even mathematical formulas. As a result, there would be as many as four or five champions for one year. And despite not awarding a national championship, the NCAA does publish a list of recognized consensus national titles. As a result, some schools claim more titles than the NCAA recognizes: Alabama itself once only recognized the six titles the NCAA did, then Bama claimed five more pre-50’s titles in the 80’s, so now there’s a debate whether or not Alabama has since won ten total national titles or fifteen, even though they potentially could claim as many as nineteen. As a result, all college football championships at the top level are often called “mythical.”

Five years after the NCAA decided to split their hundreds of institutions into three divisions, they split Division I into D-1A and D-1AA in 1978. They also instituted playoffs and a championship for Division I-AA, now known as the Division I Football Championship Subdivision. Meanwhile, Division I-A (now Football Bowl Subdivision) continued using the same old system until the 90’s, when the Bowl Coalition, then the Bowl Alliance, and eventually the Bowl Championship Series attempted to turn one bowl into a national title game. This continued with much controversy until this season, when the College Football Playoff took over. Even though the NCAA recognizes their “consensus” championships, they are not NCAA championships. Clear as mud? So are most things in college football.

So while Oregon or Ohio State can celebrate as much as they want Monday night, the folks at North Dakota can hold their head up high. With only three losses in four years, they are winners of the NCAA’s highest football championship.

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