College football continues to tinker with its format for deciding a national championship, but as a new book by Keith Gaddie points out, that’s been an ongoing effort for more than a century.

Gaddie, a professor of political science by day, is the author of Bragging Rites: College Football’s Disputed Titles, published last month by TCU Press. A graduate of Georgia and a long-time faculty member at Oklahoma before moving to TCU in 2023, Gaddie said his lifelong passion for college football led him to dig deep into the sport’s long history of using various processes to decide that age-old question “Who’s No. 1?”

“I’ve always been a fan, and when I get interested in a thing, I write about it, and that’s how I ended up writing about Southern politics, law, architecture, the environment — I get curious about something and then write about it,” Gaddie said in an interview last week with AL.com. “College football, I’ve always been fascinated by the way people argue over it, and debate it, and I’ve always found the way that we pick a national champion to be so strange, in a way. Which is, we rely upon the judgment of some experts to just take a look and pick, right? That’s what we’ve always historically done, and then we started trying to fix it, and every time we tried to fix it, it seemed like it just kept stirring controversy.”

In the book, Gaddie traces college football’s national championship selection process from its earliest incarnations even prior to the 1930s, when the Associated Press first began polling sports writers from across the country as to who the best teams were. The United Press (later UPI) began its coaches poll in 1950, and that method of crowning a champion — sometimes multiple champions — remained in place until the Bowl Championship Series in 1998 and later the College Football Playoff in 2014.

But that process has rarely been universally agreed upon or accepted, with dozens of outfits — including one backed by a Los Angeles bakery — selecting their own “national champion” through either the use of mathematical formulas, computer algorithms or simple subjectivity. Many of these are still in use today, though their level of acceptance generally depends upon where a given observer’s loyalties lie.

“The idea was to kind of dig into it and then think about all the logic that different people use when you’re in the sports bar and you’re two beers in before people get stupid,” Gaddie said. “And the reasoning and the logic that they applied to make any argument about titles, you know, transitivity and ‘what-ifs’ and all that. I thought it was just good to write it all down and remember it.

“… It’s a story about the evolution of the game. It’s also the story of the disruption of the game, and the great names and the thing that made them great, whether it was their titles, or an innovation they brought to the game. I saw an opportunity to tell the bigger story of the game for folks that either hadn’t run across it or didn’t know how to get to it.”

Gaddie also addresses the idea of “retrospective” national championships, which many schools claim and even hang banners for. These are championships that were not officially awarded in real time, but recognized many years later after research — usually conducted by a given school’s athletic media relations department — uncovered evidence of an “uncrowned” champion that was either from the pre-poll era or was overlooked for other reasons.

Alabama, of course, claims several such “national championships” — from 1925, 1926, 1930, 1934 and 1941. The latter of these is particularly open to ridicule, given that the Crimson Tide lost twice that year — to Vanderbilt and Mississippi State — and didn’t even win the SEC.

“Alabama offers one of the more incredible (or uncredible) claims to a national title,” Gaddie writes in Bragging Rites. “… Alabama ranked 20th in the final 1941 AP poll, which was released a month before the Cotton Bowl.

“So how does a two-loss, 20th-ranked team in the eyes of the sportswriters that finished third in the SEC claim a title? The answer is Deke Houlgate and the Houlgate System. The Associated Press, as well as nearly every other selector at the time, picked Minnesota.”

But Alabama is not the only “culprit” for suspicious national champions, Gaddie notes. His beloved Georgia Bulldogs — a cartoon drawing of Herschel Walker graces the cover of Bragging Rites — also have what he admits is a weak claim for their 1942 national championship, with Ohio State possessing a much stronger resume.

Not that the polls have been flawless, either. For years, the AP and UPI chose to crown their national champions before the bowl games, which led to some regrettable championship selections such as Alabama in 1973 (when the Crimson Tide lost to undefeated Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl).

“Overall, though, the polls did great,” Gaddie said. “But what happened, was the game changed underneath them, because the bowls became widespread after being really treated as exhibition games in the beginning. And the polls were just late to the table in terms of changing their system of doing a final poll.”And even after the polls switched to a post-bowl format for their final rankings, you still had controversy on occasion. Colorado was ranked No. 1 by the AP after the 1990 season despite a loss to Illinois and an infamous “fifth-down” win over Missouri, while coaches poll champion Georgia Tech finished 11-0-1.

The BCS was supposed to fix all that, and in most years it did. However, football fans’ — not to mention journalists’ — natural suspicion of the computer rankings that made up much of the formula led to constant tweaking of the system.

“Nobody will ever argue for math,” Gaddie notes, “and math cannot argue for itself.”

College football has for the last 11 seasons had a playoff, which means the championship is decided on the field. The argument now is over access — which teams from which conferences are included in the playoff, be it the 4-team format from 2014-23, the 12-team system now in place or the 14-team (plus) proposals for future years.

And even during the playoff era, you’ve had schools — looking at you, 2017 Central Florida — try to crown themselves national champions outside the playoff system. Like a lot of people, Gaddie blames the NCAA for that — and for the impetus to write his book.

“The NCAA has a lot of problems, and the way they decided not to hurt anybody’s feelings by deciding that there were 104 different selectors who could all declare a national champion was legitimate, is absurd,” Gaddie said. “And then the Colley Matrix comes along and dissents from the outcome of the AP and of the playoff, and then (UCF) has the audacity to claim that national title. That was a point where I decided I really wanted to look into it and write about it.”

Bragging Rites is available from TCU Press or at most online booksellers.