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QUESTION: Is this the best national title game QB matchup ever?
Is Joe Burrow of LSU versus Trevor Lawrence of Clemson the best quarterback matchup in a college football national championship game? Good question.
Let’s dive into some of the details and parameters.
If we are talking solely about the College Football Playoff era, yes. This is better than Jalen Hurts-Deshaun Watson or last year’s Trevor Lawrence-Tua Tagovailoa showdown, if only because Hurts hadn’t developed as a passer in 2016 and Tagovailoa was dealing with an injury he suffered against Georgia in the 2018 SEC Championship Game a month before he faced Clemson in Santa Clara. Joe Burrow has had the best season of any quarterback in the six-year College Football Playoff era. If the 2018 season’s national title game offered a great matchup — and it did — this one is greater.
If we are including the Bowl Championship Series era when looking at national championship game QB matchups, this game probably isn’t No. 1. We would have to go to the 2006 Rose Bowl — Matt Leinart of USC and Vince Young of Texas — as the gold standard. Trevor Lawrence is a terrific quarterback — no one disputes this — but his 2019 season was not transcendent. Leinart and Young provided a better clash of two quarterbacks at the height of their powers. The fact that they both played magnificently in that 2006 Rose Bowl makes it hard to displace that game from the top spot.
If we include national championship games from the pre-BCS era, it is true that these title games were not “official” championship games. They often occurred within a context of New Year’s Day bowl results. At the time some of these games started, they weren’t national championship games. However, when these games ended, a number of them had in fact decided the national title.
Of these games, a prime example would be Tommie Frazier of Nebraska versus Danny Wuerffel of Florida in the 1996 Fiesta Bowl, which became the national championship game for the 1995 season. Frazier has a legitimate claim to having the best college football career — not one season (Burrow in 2019, Cam Newton in 2010), but a full career — of all time. Wuerffel has a legitimate claim to being the best quarterback in the history of the SEC.
Burrow versus Lawrence is a top-three all-time matchup. Right now, it isn’t No. 1. However, in fairness to both men, if they dazzle on Monday night, this story could be rewritten. Stay tuned.
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