Despite the fact that Clemson football defeated Alabama in the National Championship game, the NCAA record book says differently.
The official NCAA record book for FBS football was updated this week with a bit of a surprise.
Despite Clemson football winning the National Championship game, the record book has the Tigers listed as co-champions with Alabama for the 2018 season. According to the record book, Clemson is considered the National Champion by the AP and USA Today, but Alabama is considered the champion by the National Football Foundation Network.
This is the first time in the history of the CFB Playoff that this has happened, first reported by Zach Lentz at Clemson Maven.
From what we gathered, this is seemingly a mistake on the NCAA’s part. The Football Foundation replied to the original report and explained that their final regular season poll had Alabama No. 1, but that they present their trophy and name a champion following the National Championship game. The trophy was presented to Clemson football.
Alabama has taken a page out of UCF's book and become recognized by the NCAA as consensus national champions for 2018.https://t.co/oTgxgSmlzg
— RedditCFB (@RedditCFB) July 9, 2019
The Football Foundation has contacted the NCAA about making the change to the record book.
UPDATE: The NCAA has now updated its record book and Clemson is the unanimous National Champion again.
In the end, this is just a strange story.
Many Tiger fans may take it as a slight or a conspiracy with the NCAA- and that certainly could be the case- but more than likely this seems as if it’s just a miscommunication on the part of the NCAA with the National Football Foundation that will be changed.
It certainly needs to be taken care of soon, though, because we all know how quick Alabama is to claim National Championships. Though, we would suspect that even the Crimson Tide faithful could push aside their own bias to see that the Tigers deserved to be unanimous National Champions in 2018.
It would be highly doubtful they’d want to hang a banner for a year in which they were beaten 44-16 in a championship game.