In this limited "playoff" chosen by a panel, just like gymnastics and figure skating, will you still call it a "mythical" champion, or will you give it full due as true national champion?
It depends. Will the NCAA be actually recognizing them as champion? The reason people call it MNC now is because there is not an official, recognized NCAA champion, it has nothing to do with the NCAA. The title is something else.
I've never considered any to be championships when there was any other team with as good a record or a solid argument to be in the top 2. Very few yrs have 2 teams emerged undefeated and no 1 loss team with truly solid argument. During the BCS yrs I can only think of 2 yrs (2000 and 2005) that at least one other team didn't receive significant support for #2. If 1 and 2 aren't near unanimous (always gonna be 10-20% homer votes) then how can it be a championship. Should 45% of all voters think Boise should be #2 and 50% think ou should, the #1 didn't clearly play the 2nd most deserving team. They played the 2nd most popular. That's not a championship
Fermats Last Theorem Riemann's Hypothesis The Grassy Knoll Area 51 College Football's Division One National Championship Only one -- the first listed -- is considered in the bag, and that took 358 years. Just looking over a brief rundown on it is as dizzy an affair as reading about the MNC. ...Andrew Wiles presented his proof of the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture for semistable elliptic curves; together with Ribet's proof of the epsilon conjecture ... (so on and so forth)... and... something something... saved by returning to his original Horizontal Iwasawa theory approach, which he had abandoned in favour of the Kolyvagin–Flach approach... (Wiki) No less mystifying than contemplating the MNC. Hence I turn to fiction for relaxation.
So we are really back to square one with this "panel" of judges. This group of football pundits/coaches will pick and choose who they see fit to play in the "playoff". The only way, IMO, to find the true champion is to only take the conference champions, seed them and let them play it off. Otherwise, you still have the Boise States, USC's, TCU's and any other unbeatens out there that can lay claim to a title.
I'll choose to call them Post-season Tournament Champions. It won't be sponsored by the NCAA like all of the other tournaments, but the only real difference will be the number of teams invited to the tournament. Just like the NIT was before basketball's post-season tournament was taken over by the NCAA. This year, we have a tournament with only 2 invitees, and in a few years, we are expanding it to 4. Who knows what the future will bring. NCAA still won't recognize them unless they run it though.
I would refer to it as national champion at this point. There is a low chance but a possibility that you have more than 4 teams with either undefeated record or a 1 loss record and then it basically an arbitrary decision of which 4 teams to pick. So you could have a deserving team in the #5 spot that gets screwed. Or you could have a Boise St calibur team with an undefeated record and get left out of the top 4. In those cases it would not be a true national championship. And this is why they need to go to an 8 team playoff. I think they will eventually once they see how much $$ this final 4 reaps.
Here's what needs to be done: 1. Unlimited scholarships 2. Round robin scheduling 3. Season begins the first Saturday in September and ends the last Saturday in August 4. You're welcome
