What is the worst college football team to win/share a national title?

The two that jump out at me are 1984 BYU and 1990 Georgia Tech.

 

byu in a rout

 

I tend to agree, so who other than BYU?

 

Wasn't there a Colorado team that shared a title? Maybe the year of the fifth-down game?

 

A one-loss, one-tie Colorado team (that needed a fifth down to beat Mizzou) shared a national championship with the aforementioned GaTech side. No winners there.

 

1990 Colorado team, which actually had two losses and a tie. Surprised you didn't mention this Mizzou.

 

There's a difference between being the worst team and being undeserving. Did Colorado deserve to win the national title that year? No. Would the Buffs have destroyed Georgia Tech? Almost definitely. That was a good Colorado team.

 

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This. The famous 5th down fiasco was all that saved that Colorado team from a 9-2-1 regular season record, and then they were damn lucky to squeeze out that 10-9 Orange Bowl win after Ismail's game winning TD got called back.

1990 was the year they should've just declared no champion. Neither Colorado nor Ga Tech passed the smell test. The best team that year was probably Miami, but they had two losses.

 

Agreed.

There was a story, I think Dufresne wrote it the last time there was a split title about which team would have been favored (on a neutral field) if the split champs (the recent ones) had to play each other.

CU would have been a 17 point favorite over Georgia Tech.
Miami would have been a 10 point favorite over Washington.
Nebraska would have been a 3 point favorite over Michigan.
USC would have been a 10 point favorite over LSU.

Does it mean anything? No, but it's pretty interesting.

 

The two-loss LSU team needs to be mentioned as well.

 

Colorado only had one loss and one tie, and the fifth-down win against the Miz. They also needed a clipping penalty on Rocket Ismail's kickoff return in the fourth quarter to escape the Orange Bowl with a 10-9 win that year.

 

In the sense they had two losses, but they were both triple-OT games. They smashed then-#9 Virginia Tech 48-7 and beat five other ranked teams before defeating #1 Ohio State 38-24. Nowhere near as unworthy as BYU and Colorado.