College football, at least at the FBS level, has somehow consistently managed to have a terrible system for picking a national champion. For a long time, the sport simply determined an unofficial national champion based on the final polls. This led to, on three occasions between 1990 and 1997, a split national championship in which different groups declared two different teams to be the national champion.
This led to the BCS, a system by which the consensus two best teams in the country were guaranteed to play each other for the national title. Or at least that was the idea.