The start of this lineal championship in college football in 1979 goes back to a conviction, one surmises, that it would be good to run a championship this way and it should start with Alabama. We've changed our mind about a few things since then, but not about Alabama as a worthy starting point. It just might not be the correct starting point.
So, we've got some 'splainin' to do here, perhaps. It's 1979 and a teenager decided to model a college football championship on a traveling prize that operated in a recently defunct local high school league.
The idea was the Ear of Corn, a traveling trophy contested among the football teams of the Cornbelt Conference in Western Illinois, tiny farm schools that have so much diminished since then that a fair number of them have been consolidated into one another.
It's hard for people to remember this, and much of the audience, perhaps, wasn't even around in those days, but the national championship in college football was seriously open to interpretation. Anyone could just name a national champion, because the championship was, as we all used to say, "mythical." There really was no such thing as a national college football champion.
It actually was a lot of fun. We certainly weren't screaming for college football playoffs in our corner. Anybody could have playoffs. In college football, champions were decided with votes. And if you don't like the vote, name your own champion.
So, we decided to name the champion on the principle, that, as Ric Flair later put it, "To be the man, you have to beat the man,” the logarithmic imperative of the Ear of Corn. And it had to start somewhere. And it was 1979, and there wasn't a clear choice.
The 1978 season included a rather important game, Southern Cal's 24-14 win at No. 1 Alabama. The year before, Southern Cal was top-ranked when Alabama ended that with a 21-20 win at the Coliseum in Los Angeles. In 1978, the Trojans returned the favor at Alabama.
It turned out to be very costly for Alabama, which rallied to regain the top ranking before holding off No. 2 Penn State, 14-7, in a terrific Sugar Bowl. Meanwhile, No. 3 USC defeated the No. 5 team, Michigan, in a 17-10 Rose Bowl. When the polls came out, they split. The AP poll of writers and broadcasters gave their No. 1 ranking to Alabama. The coaches in the United Press International poll gave it to USC.
This kind of thing used to happen a lot in college football, and we would simply argue about it without resolution until deciding to name our own national champions. It's true, by the way, that USC beat Alabama, but Alabama didn't lose another game for the rest of the year, while the Trojans lost by two touchdowns two weeks later at unranked Arizona State.
Not for nothing, let's mention that the 1978 USC team had Marcus Allen, Chip Banks, Ronnie Lott, Anthony Munoz and Charles White, among others. The 1978 Alabama team had USFL immortal Buddy Aydelette, Tony Nathan, Dwight Stephenson, E.J. Junior and Rich Wingo, who now is a U.S. Representative from Alabama.
One supposes that's what was going on here, back in 1979, when we began a national championship and gave it to Alabama, was that we were putting our foot down with the conviction that Alabama had to be the national champion. All these years later, that's what it must have been.
Because, equally, it could have been begun with Southern Cal. But we didn't do it that way.
In recent years, looking at these traveling championships, we've come around to a different way of seeing them. At first, it was sort of an idiosyncratic play, just follow the traveling championship and see where it goes. In some of the early pieces on this site talking about the traveler, we even characterized it as a kind of benign "fake news."
But we have come to believe that the lineal championship is not fake news. This is because it somehow entered our thick head that there absolutely is and must be a fact of the matter. We might have wondered dreamily before then if there really was or could be a fact of the matter, but a certain exercise with an American rugby league pointed up that the factuality of the matter is inescapable.
The history of college football should have made this obvious, because college football, unlike the other sports, has a specific, historical First Game. Perhaps the fact that no other sport has quite that historical feature made it less obvious.
So, we gave the championship to Alabama at the start of 1979, and we could be wrong about that. We could be wrong about it because there is an actual lineal progression of winners through time going back to that first game. Either Alabama really was that team at the start of 1979 or it wasn't. There is a fact of the matter. What's the fact?
The most interesting way to find out is by going to the start. We're actually going to two starts. Here, we're starting with 1979, Alabama being named national champion by a teenager and defending it against all comers.
Another project, soon to begin, hearkens to that First Game. Any other sport poses a “where to begin” question that can only be answered with a play-down, such as we used for American pro rugby and a few of the new ultra-regional baseball lineals.
But in college football, we don't even need that. We just need Princeton and Rutgers, Nov. 6, 1869. First game ever played. It's in the books, also, as the first collegiate soccer game ever played, as the game closely resembled association football.
We know that Rutgers won the game, 6-4. We also know that Princeton won the rematch weeks later, 8-0. The lineal championship was on. Princeton held it at the end of 1869.
So, we shall begin following college football historically, and go through all of our sports historically as much as we can. It will be a way to relive the history through this entirely new prism of lineal and pyramid championships.
And we can go from there. When we get to 110 years later, 1979, maybe the lineal really didn't belong to Alabama. But we also are absolutely sure that the true history of the lineal championship in college football going back to Nov. 6, 1869, comes to Alabama today, just as we have it.
The possibilities for where the lineal can go are not infinite. They are constrained by the number of teams in competition and the relative strengths of the teams. Over time – we've had 41 years – any two paths of lineal progression will converge, and then be joined to one path, the one and only true lineal path of universal, exceptionless invincibility that runs through the history of every sport.
We believe that if Alabama was not the team truly located on the one true path of the lineal championship at the start of the 1979 season, then this path we are taking, being an erroneous path, will inevitably merge with and become that one and only true path of lineal championship, certainly by now, and most likely within two, three, five years of the start of 1979, some time like that. We shall see.
Alabama may or may not have been the correct choice for launching this lineal college football championship at the start of the 1979 season. But it certainly was a good choice. Obviously, Alabama handled the task easily, winning all 12 of its games in 1979, mostly by lopsided scores. At the end of 1979, Alabama was, indeed, the consensus national champion.
