Mythical national championship

A mythical national championship (sometimes abbreviated MNC) is national championship recognition that is not explicitly competitive. This phrase has often been invoked in reference to American college football, especially when referring to seasons predating the Bowl Championship Series because the NCAA did not sponsor a playoff-style tournament or recognize official national champions for the Football Bowl Subdivision. The relevant recognition before 1998 came from various entities, including coach polls and media ballots, which each voted to recognize their own national champions. The contrary term is undisputed national championship.

"Mythical national champion" is a term used since at least 1920 for a championship won by a NCAA Division I football team, especially for titles won before the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) system began in 1998. Before the BCS, polls in which coaches and/or sportwriters voted, such as the AP, UPI, and USA Today polls, awarded championships. This led to seasons in which two or even more teams could claim to have won the national championship.

The BCS attempted to eliminate uncertainty by ranking college teams and inviting the top two teams at the end of the regular season to play in a championship game. These teams were determined by the BCS ranking formula, which itself used a combination of human voter polls and computer rankings. The process of selecting the two best teams for the BCS championship game had nonetheless resulted in controversy, which reached a head in 2003 when the AP poll refused to vote the BCS champions as their national champions.

Since the 2014 season, the College Football Playoff—an association of Division I FBS collegiate conferences and independent schools, along with six bowl games—has arranged for the top four teams (based on a thirteen-member committee that seeds and selects the teams similarly to the Final Four) into two semifinal bowl games and the winners go on to compete in the CFP National Championship Game. This is likely to eliminate future instances of the polls disputing the arranged championship, as the winner will always have defeated two top-4 teams in consecutive games, a feat which would normally in and of itself warrant top-ranking.

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