College football has been around since the 1860s. Record keeping has not always been stellar, but comprehensive databases are filling the gap adequately.

For these purposes, the rankings are determined in two ways:

1: Polls, which are king. The poll prior to bowl season is used, and whichever poll is the standard (CFP, BCS, or AP) gets preference.

The polls determine tiebreakers. Prior to the conference championship game era, many seasons ended in ties at the top of conferences. The highest ranked team in the poll of that era gets preference as conference champion.

2: The College Football Reference Database and the Simple Rating System, which helps determine rankings prior to 1936 (the first AP polls). It’s a quality metric to determine team rankings. If there are not six conference champions ranked in a poll or more at large teams are required, the SRS determines the rest.

2014-Present: College Football Playoff Rankings

1998-2013: BCS Rankings

1936-1997: AP Poll

1869-1935: CFBR’s SRS

• If any poll year does not fill a 12-team field or does not produce six conference champions, SRS determines remaining conference champion AQs and at-large teams.

Early years of college football often had less than 12 teams. For those years I did not calculate a playoff.

If your team or school are not included above, it would not have qualified for the 12-team College Football Playoff from 1869-2022.

This project only works with one champion per conference, and most years in college football history award multiple co-champions for conferences.

The predominant poll of the time is used to break ties between co-champions, and the higher ranked team is awarded the conference championship automatic qualifying spot. Some schools may still have qualified for at-large seeds, but some schools were eliminated from the playoff entirely.

For almost 130 years college football did not determine a national champion with a system in which the best teams played each other. It didn’t use a playoff format until 2014.

This project envisions what teams may have qualified for the playoff had it been around since the start of the sport.

This project can only be taken at face value. It is a fun and insightful look into the history of college football, one of our nation’s oldest sports, through a modern lens. It cannot be used to retroactively award championships.

However, I do believe that this system is consistently applicable through all 153 years of organized college football so far.

If anything, this should give hope to fans of teams that never seem to be near the top — your chance is coming — and warning to teams who seem to be on top of the world — it hasn’t always been this way, and it won’t be like this forever.