Question: Are the days of a true dark horse winning a national championship over?

Tide&True

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Sep 24, 2004
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I’m not talking about the UCF’s of the world but a team that plays a legit schedule and no one has on their radar at the beginning of the year.


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NationalTitles18

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May 25, 2003
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I’m not talking about the UCF’s of the world but a team that plays a legit schedule and no one has on their radar at the beginning of the year.


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That West Georgia team did it one year (ranked 22 to start the year) and came pretty close 3 years later (unranked until week 7). Okie Lite and Iowa St came pretty close.
 

TideEngineer08

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Jun 9, 2009
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No. But were they ever really that frequent? College football championships have always been dominated by about 15 or so of the same Universities. Every now and then a dark horse sneaks in, but you can bank on your champion coming from that group of 15 or so every year.
 

Power Eye

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Aug 3, 2005
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I think the short answer to the question is yes. With the playoff, you will never see a BYU, Colorado, or Georgia Tech win a national title. But honestly, with the BCS you didn’t see those type of teams play for a title either.
 

NationalTitles18

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May 25, 2003
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I think the short answer to the question is yes. With the playoff, you will never see a BYU, Colorado, or Georgia Tech win a national title. But honestly, with the BCS you didn’t see those type of teams play for a title either.
The playoff format makes it much more difficult.

Back when a dark horse would win once in a blue moon the bowl matchups were a crapshoot. The Bowl Alliance improved on that and the BCS came close to perfection.

Even if a dark horse gets into the playoff they have to beat not one but two of the best teams in the land to win it all. That is going to be too much for most dark horse team because 99/100 times they will be far outmatched in talent by both teams they would have to face.

This applies to teams like Utah or Ok St more than the West Georgia's and others that generally have good to excellent recruiting compared to mediocre.
 

rgw

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Sep 15, 2003
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Ironically, the bowl system was more likely to produce a non-P5 champion than this playoff system. I think committee structure is implicitly built to wall off non-P5 teams from participating by using an opaque human decision-making process instead of a cut-and-dry public metric. Even if a G5 or independent makes it into the field, I am skeptical of their ability to handle several elite teams in succession. Remember we've never seen a team like Boise State, Utah, or TCU beat a truly elite team. 2008 Alabama is probably the best scalp the G5 has ever earned. Even so, we understand that was an overachieving team that caught their highest quality regular season opponent off-guard, had a surprisingly weak schedule, but had several deficiencies that weren't really exposed until very late in the season. Furthermore, Alabama lost their most important offensive player before the game was even played due to Andre Smith making illegal agreements/money exchanges with an agent.

UCF even with Milton is not beating Alabama and Clemson back to back. They might get one of them but even in the Auburn Peach Bowl last year you could see that UCF was absolutely spent by the end of that game and Auburn just didn't have enough time left to finish the comeback. Auburn was a broken offense after Kerryon got banged up and they still were gashing them by the 4th quarter. What do you think each of those loaded offenses would be doing to UCF in the second half?
 

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