In addition to the 15 claimed by the Alabama program, the Official NCAA Football Records Book has cited 5 additional championship years for which a case could be made for Alabama to hold the title: 1945, 1962, 1966, 19. The NCAA does not itself recognize official national champions, but does provide a partial listing of various organizations' selections of a champion, often noting several teams in the same year. After his retirement, Alabama sports information director Wayne Atcheson added four claimed championships to the team's official program notes. Until 1982, Alabama claimed only one national championship prior to the tenure of Coach Paul "Bear" Bryant. These organizations include the National Championship Foundation (NCF), Helms Athletic Foundation, Dickinson System, Dunkel Index, Houlgate, Litkenhaus, Spalding's Football Guide, and the College Football Research Association (CFRA). Various organization and associations, termed "selectors", have published rankings for those years, often retroactively. Therefore, championships claimed for the years prior to the "poll era", which came into its own in the 1940s, are the most contentious. In 2014 a four-team College Football Playoff was instituted to determine a national champion. Only with the debut of the "Bowl Championship Series" at the end of the 1998 college football season was a consensus reached on a unanimously-declared national champion of Division I-A college football. These polls were well-respected, but they published their final poll results before the postseason bowl games until 19, respectively. The Associated Press (AP) began conducting a national poll of sports writers to rank teams in the 1930s, followed by United Press International's poll of coaches in 1950. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) began organizing college football into major and minor divisions in 1956, but, due to the power of the bowl game organizers, has never operated its own system for determining a champion in football. The proliferation of post-season bowl games fostered rare cross-country comparisons between teams. The sport only gradually became broad enough in geographical scope and its rules standardized enough to conceive of crowning a national champion. Before that, the number of players revealed varied.) Alabama’s SEC Heisman leaders have been HB Harry Gilmer, who finished fifth in 1945 QB Pat Trammell, fifth in 1961 QB Steadman Shealy, 10th in 1979 LB Derrick Thomas, 10th in 1988 QB Jay Barker, fifth in 1994 RB Shaun Alexander, seventh in 1999 RB Mark Ingram, first in 2009 RB Trent Richardson, third in 2011 QB AJ McCarron, second in 2013 WR Amari Cooper, third in 2014 RB Derrick Henry, first in 2015 DE Jonathan Allen, seventh in 2016 QB Tua Tagovailoa, second in 2018 and WR DeVonta Smith in 2020.At the advent of college football (first played in a much different form in the 1860s at Rutgers and Princeton), the concept of a "national champion" was nonsensical. (A top 10 has been released annually since 1951. The Crimson Tide has had the SEC’s top finisher more times than any other conference member, although in 16 years, the SEC’s top finisher is not known because a league player did not show up among the published voting leaders. 15 Alabama players have been the top SEC finisher in the Heisman Trophy voting, including this year, when Crimson Tide QB Bryce Young has placed in the top four.
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