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1980
College Football National Championship
Alas,
I've only written one National Championship article in the last 6
years. Just been too busy! I would still like to write full articles
about each season like I have for 1901-1969, but for now, what I am
going to do instead is write partial articles that do nothing more than
explain my reasoning for my Mythical National Championship selections.
Full profiles of the teams and their seasons will have to wait until I
have time to write those up.
Here
is how
all of the organizations listed in the NCAA Records Book see the 1980
mythical
national championship (omitting selections made by a single magazine or
by math/computer
ratings, which are not generally accepted as MNCs):
12-0 Georgia:
AP
Poll, UPI Poll
(coaches),
Football
Writers Association of America, National Football
Foundation, Helms, National Championship
Foundation
11-1 Pittsburgh:
CFB Researchers
And here we go again. For the 5th straight year, the College Football Researchers Association is wrong again, and for the 4th time in those 5 years, they are the only
organization going against an otherwise unanimous choice. And once again, they do not even share
their MNC with the legit MNC team. It could not be more clear that this
organization was not interested in selecting actual MNCs; their sole interest was trying to be as contrarian as possible.
I'll say this for the CFRA: it is true that Georgia 1980 was
a pretty weak MNC team. They struggled to win game after game, posting
half a dozen weak performances that did not at all reflect a typical #1
team. But they did win every game, and they did play 3 rated opponents (fixed AP poll),
capped by a 17-10 win over #7 Notre Dame (9-2-1) in the Sugar Bowl.
Pittsburgh also played 3 rated opponents, but they were beaten handily,
36-22, at 10-2 Florida State. Pitt did perform better than Georgia did,
but as I've said before, performance is a lesser concern, and Pitt's
schedule was simply not tougher enough than Georgia's to forgive the
loss.
Furthermore, I believe that 10-2 Florida State should be ranked
higher than Pittsburgh anyway, given that they easily beat them.
Details on that can be found in my article on fixing the 1980 AP poll. In fact, I have Pitt ranked #5 on the season, so nowhere near #1... or an MNC.
As I said to end my previous MNC article... the CFRA was absolutely inept.