Winning the national title after losing the season opener

For fans whose teams lost their college football season opener, there is still hope your school can win this year’s national championship.

Oregon fans tuned in to the season opener against Auburn high on the expectations of an offseason where the Ducks had been talked up as a potential College Football Playoff team. They were forced to watch as the dreams of a perfect season evaporated over the course of the second half of a 27-21 defeat, the final dagger thrown by freshman quarterback Bo Nix into the arms of a leaping Seth Williams for the winning score with just nine seconds left in the contest.

Every year, a highly-rated team is destined to start the season 0-1 due to the proliferation of neutral-site kickoff games between Power Five opponents likely to be ranked in the preseason polls. While we often tend to think of losses later in the season as more impactful on a team’s ability to get into the national championship race, there is an equal risk of overanalyzing a season-opening collapse as the first snowball avalanching into the rest of a lost season.

But is a season truly lost when your favorite school comes out and loses right out of the gate, as Oregon did on Saturday night at AT&T Stadium? Is all hope lost for the Ducks and other teams that suffer defeat in their season opener, or is there still a faint possibility of moving on and forging ahead on the path toward a national championship?

There is good news and bad news for teams like Oregon

First, let’s dive into the bad news. Since the Bowl Coalition era launched in 1992, no team has won even a share of the national championship after losing in their season opener. The closest a team has come actually occurred in 2014, the first year of the College Football Playoff.

That year, Ohio State fell by two touchdowns at home in Week 2 to a Virginia Tech team that finished 6-6 in the regular season. Despite that embarrassing defeat, the Buckeyes went on to win the rest of their games, claim the Big Ten title with their third-string quarterback, and slide into the first College Football Playoff field as the No. 4 seed.

From there, Urban Meyer’s Buckeyes upset first top-ranked Alabama and then an Oregon team that crushed defending national champion Florida State in the Rose Bowl to reach the title game. Any amount of chaos can occur in a season, and it is risky to say that anything is impossible in a sport that has featured some wacky twists and turns over 150 years of existence.

Prior to the Coalition era, when the national championship was a mythic construct rather than a codified structure, it was rare but not overly strange to watch a team lose its first game and then run the table to snatch a share of the crown.

Since the advent of the AP Poll in 1936, four schools have taken a loss in their season opener and recovered to stake a claim as the top team in college football that year. To better understand how a fan base can and should still have hope after their favorite program started on the wrong side of the scoreboard.

Coming into the 1957 season, there was little fanfare around the Ohio State program. Much like the 2014 Buckeyes team that won the first College Football Playoff, this vintage of Ohio State football looked like they were a year away from a national championship rather than competing for one immediately.

Shutout losses in their final two games of 1956 meant that the Buckeyes came into the new season unranked. That slight by the pollsters seemed entirely justified when Woody Hayes and his squad came out for their season opener on Sept. 28, 1957, and fell 18-14 at home against TCU.

Over the course of the game, the Buckeyes outgained the Horned Frogs by 78 yards. They went into the locker room up 14-12 thanks to two missed Horned Frogs extra points. But when Jack Spikes ran in the ball from 16 yards out in the third quarter to give TCU the lead, Ohio State had no answer in front of their home fans.

The following week, Ohio State went to Seattle and snatched a resounding 35-7 victory from Washington that righted the ship on the return to Columbus.

From there the Buckeyes swept their Big Ten schedule, securing the national title in the UPI Coaches Poll prior to defeating Oregon 10-7 in the Rose Bowl. (Ohio State finished No. 2 in the AP Poll behind an Auburn team on SEC probation for paying high school players and thus ineligible for postseason play.)

Eight years after Buckeyes lost their season opener but rebounded for a share of the national championship, Alabama pulled off the same feat. The Crimson Tide were coming off a consensus national title campaign in 1964 that was tarnished at the final hurdle by a 21-17 loss against Texas in the Orange Bowl.

Hopes were high that the Crimson Tide would complete the feat and run the table all the way in 1965. Heading to Athens to face Georgia between the hedges, Alabama fans and most neutral followers of the game expected a result similar to the previous season’s 31-3 Tide win in Tuscaloosa.

Instead, they crumpled out of the gate thanks to an audacious play that left Bear Bryant to say after the game, “Georgia outsmarted us… and on something we had worked on.”

With less than three minutes remaining, down 17-10, Bulldogs quarterback Kirby Moore took the snap on his own 27 and passed quickly to Pat Hodgson. The end lateraled the ball to Bob Taylor, who covered the distance to the endzone. Going for two, Moore found Hodgson again for the game-winning conversion.

Alabama, though, weathered that storm. The Crimson Tide also ended the year with a tie against Tennessee on their record, but AP pollsters were convinced by their SEC title and their tough schedule to reward them with the national championship. That was rewarded come bowl season when the Tide took down Nebraska 39-28 at the Orange Bowl. (The coaches were less convinced by Alabama, ranking the Crimson Tide fourth in the final poll released before the bowl games.)

In the 1970s, USC was a dominant force running on all cylinders under head coach John McKay. As they entered the 1974 season, the Trojans were two years removed from winning the consensus national championship and coming off a top-10 season the previous season. Once again, it looked like Southern California was going to feature among the top teams in the country.

To open the new campaign, they took on Arkansas for the third straight season. In 1972, a matchup of top-10 teams ended with USC leaving Little Rock with a 31-10 toppling of the Razorbacks to kick-start a national championship run. The 1973 return match in Los Angeles featured a similar result, as the Trojans shut out Arkansas 17-0 at the Coliseum.

Similar expectations greeted the 1974 Trojans as they returned to Little Rock for another season opener against the Southwest Conference stalwart. But Arkansas had a different idea. In front of a raucously hostile crowd, the only touchdown USC managed was a 100-yard Anthony Davis return touchdown as the Razorbacks trounced the Trojans 22-7.

The consequence was a 13-spot plummet in the AP poll. That lasted all of one week, as the Trojans rebounded against then-No. 8 Pittsburgh in a 16-7 road victory.

The coaches liked USC more than the AP over the course of 1974, with the UPI rankings putting the Trojans at No. 1 after their 18-17 win over Big Ten champion Ohio State at the Rose Bowl. In the AP poll, they finished No. 2 behind undefeated Oklahoma.

The gold standard for teams rebounding from a season-opening loss remains the 1983 Miami Hurricanes. Having promised to “return the school to national prominence within five years”, 1983 marked a put-up-or-shut-up moment for Hurricanes head coach Howard Schnellenberger.

Florida didn’t get the memo. Up in Gainesville, the Gators prepared to welcome Miami in the 1984 season opener with high hopes of their own. Like Miami, Florida had lost four games over the course of 1983 but entered the new campaign full of promise. That quickly manifested itself on the gridiron when the two teams met on September 3 at Florida Field.

Turnover upon turnover mounted — by the end of the contest, Florida had taken the ball away from Miami seven times — and the Gators had no trouble turning those gifts into points. By the end of the contest, a talented by raw Miami team had suffered a 28-3 defeat that set up the Gators rather than the Hurricanes as the team to beat in the Sunshine State.

Instead of ripping into his players after the game, Schnellenberger treated the incident as though the Hurricanes had won everywhere except the scoreboard. The ploy worked masterfully.

Miami ran the table the rest of the way, averaging four touchdowns against one of the 15 toughest schedules in the nation. Playing the Orange Bowl at their home stadium against top-ranked Nebraska, the Hurricanes stopped the Cornhuskers on a two-point conversion to end the contest 31-30 victors. The next day, both major polls voted Schnellenberger’s squad the top team in the country.

What can we take away from these four stories?

In the College Football Playoff era, earning a split national championship is an increasingly unlikely prospect. And given the nature of the four-team bracket, a team like Miami — which entered the 1984 Orange Bowl as the No. 5 team in the nation and benefitted from a string of unlikely defeats in other postseason contests around the country — would never even have a hope of stealing away the national championship.

In the end, though, there are some things we can take away from these four stories (and to a similar extent Ohio State’s 2014 run) that can offer some solace for Oregon fans and others in the future whose teams fall in the season opener.

First, getting a shot at the title after a season-opening defeat does not require the victorious team to have a strong season. In four of these five cases, the eventual national champion’s loss came against a team that hovered around .500 in the regular season. Only Florida finished anywhere close to the top of their conference standings, and the Gators ended up third in the SEC behind Auburn and Georgia.

Further, as the Buckeyes demonstrated, the key in this era is getting into the playoff bracket. It does not matter whether a team finishes at No. 1 or No. 4 in the final rankings put out by the College Football Playoff selection committee. All that is important is getting into the field.

What we find, though, is that the stakes are narrow. Given that ties are no longer a thing in college football, a team must run the table and hope that their only loss can be buried behind a slew of strong wins.