Clemson won the national championship this season. Everyone agrees on this, because the Tigers won the College Football Playoff. Unlike in the pre-Playoff era, there’s no real room to dispute the identity of the real champ.
Here are the 4 trophies you get for winning college football’s national title
The sport’s winding history means there’s always been a mix of championship trophies.
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But one result of college football’s disjointed development is that several organizations have doled out their own “national championships” over the years. The NFL had a singular championship game even before the Super Bowl era, but the college game didn’t adopt a system with a guaranteed consensus champion until the Playoff began in the 2014 season.
Not even the BCS guaranteed a single champ. In the 2003 season, the BCS title game, Coaches Poll, and National Football Foundation decided LSU was the champion, while the Associated Press and Football Writers Association of America decided it was USC.
Before the BCS, a lot of seasons ended with more than one championship argument. That enabled multiple schools to claim one national title as the real title for a given season.
The byproduct is that those anointed champions needed special trophies, too. So now that we’ve got consensus every year, the champion is guaranteed a haul of hardware.
The College Football Playoff National Championship Trophy
Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images
The current standard. The Playoff describes it as an “ascending virtual football.” It’s 3’ tall and weighs 23 pounds. It’s made of 24-karat gold, bronze, and stainless steel. The golden part comes off the base, so the victors can hold it and kiss it more easily.
The AFCA National Championship Trophy
The American Football Coaches Association is the big, nationwide club of football coaches from all levels of the game. Its trophy debuted in 1986, is worth $30,000, and goes to the top finisher in the Coaches Poll. Winning “the crystal football” became the common term for winning a title in the BCS era, as the Coaches Poll was bound by contract to instantly award its No. 1 to the BCS champ.
The Associated Press National Championship Trophy
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This one goes to the top-ranked team in the AP Top 25, the longest-running human-generated poll in the sport (and pictured here after Ohio State’s 2014 win). It got its start in 1936, when Minnesota was its inaugural winner. The AP was part of the BCS formula until 2005, when media members refused to retain partial control of the rankings they were covering.
The MacArthur Bowl
Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images
This one’s been around since Syracuse won it in 1959. It’s sanctioned by the Football Writers Association of America and the National Football Foundation. It’s shaped like a stadium and features a quote by its namesake, Gen. Douglas MacArthur: “There is no substitute for victory.”
This group of trophies is 25 percent different than it was pre-Playoff.
The FWAA’s Grantland Rice Trophy is gone. Here’s Nick Saban after Alabama’s 2012 title win, with the green Rice Trophy second from the left:
Photo by Streeter Lecka/Getty Images
Here’s Ohio State enjoying the first-ever Playoff trophy, with the AP and AFCA flanking it:
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The MacArthur Bowl is typically presented in an event at the College Football Hall of Fame the following spring. It’s not clear why the AP trophy was available for Ohio State’s post-title parade but hadn’t made it to Clemson a week after the Tigers beat Alabama. But eventually, the Tigers will have all of them.
Those are just the national championship trophies. Clemson trotted out even more.
The only title-game trophies that Clemson was officially presented with after its parade last weekend were the Playoff’s and the AFCA’s. But elsewhere on stage, Clemson displayed a bunch more from the last three seasons:
Clemson got trophies for winning the ACC Atlantic each of the last two years, plus for winning the ACC Championship Game both years, the school said. Those are the duplicate-looking ACC trophies you see above.
It got trophies that look like plaques for its wins in the Playoff semifinals in each of the last two years: the 2015 season’s Orange Bowl against Oklahoma, plus this season’s Fiesta Bowl against Ohio State. Those are separate from the standard Orange and Fiesta trophies they also won in those games.
It also included the Palmetto Bowl Trophy, which is retained by the most recent winner of Clemson vs. South Carolina.
Clemson’s won six bowl games in the last five seasons, if you count the Playoff as a series of bowls. It’s got two divisional and two conference titles in the last two years, plus the Playoff trophy and three other title trophies.
Clemson was the biggest winner in this college football season. Another winner might be whoever sells large, elegant trophy cases in South Carolina.
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