Could College Football Have Different Fall and Spring National Champs?

With the Big Ten, Pac-12, MAC and Mountain West now looking to play football in the fall, we face the potential for the return of the split national title.

Though it hasn't happened since the 2003 season (when LSU and USC shared it), the split national championship used to be a fairly regular occurrence in college football. 

Michigan and Nebraska famously each claim a national title for the 1997 season, Washington and Miami (1991), Colorado and Georgia Tech (1990), Alabama and USC (1978), USC and Oklahoma (1974) and Notre Dame and Alabama (1973) all have national championship trophies in their cases with identical years on them. 

Texas famously split the 1970 title three ways with Nebraska and Ohio State. 

There was a time not that long ago when conferences were locked into certain bowl games at the end of the year and you almost had to get lucky to see No. 1 play No. 2 in the final game of the season to settle the score on the field. 

Then in the 1990s the Bowl Alliance came along. It was an imperfect system that didn't include the (then) Pac-10 or Big Ten champs (who were still locked into the Rose Bowl). That problem was later solved by the Bowl Championship Series, which was succeeded by the College Football Playoff. 

After more than two decades of seeing (at least) the two best teams in the country play at the end of the season, it's hard to fathom a split national title in today's college football landscape. 

At least, it was hard to fathom before the most-recent developments. 

On Tuesday the Big Ten became the first Power 5 conference to cancel sports for the 2020 season. The hopes (according to reports) are that the conference can play its football in the spring. The Pac-12 followed shortly after.

On the Group of 5 side, both the MAC and Mountain West Conferences have already made similar decisions. 

Meanwhile the ACC, SEC and Sun Belt appear to be digging their heels in to play college football in the fall with current truncated schedules. 

The Big 12 appears to be the wild card. Should the conference decide to wait and attempt a season in the spring of 2021, it may very well set up a scenario where the rest of the conferences have no choice but to follow. However, should the league go forward with its current fall sports plans, it may create a world with two different college football seasons - and with it - two different national champions. 

One would think should three of the Power 5 conferences go forward with football in the fall the College Football Playoff will still select four teams and play through its normal postseason sans the other two leagues. Eventually we would see a semi-normal ending to the year with a national champ crowned after the three-game tournament. 

On the other hand the Pac-12 and Big Ten could host what amounts to its own four-team tournament, using its conference championship games as semifinals and a championship game (which would obviously be named the Rose Bowl) to follow. 

It's certainly a little dissatisfying for college football fans who have grown up with the idea of a definitive champion, but it could also be a fun throwback to the old days where two fanbases spent the offseason debating on which team would have won on the field. 

Even with the current four-team playoff format, no other sport relies more on subjectivity than college football, where an exclusive postseason tournament is populated and seeded by a committee behind closed doors. In fact, some would argue the game thrives on that controversy. 

We may get even more of it than expected in 2020-21. 

Also, a college football season that stretches from September to April? You can certainly count me in.