The NCAA has decided that USC must vacate the 2005 BCS championship, and decreed that there will be no champion for that year. At the end of that season, Auburn finished #2 in the polls, but it was Oklahoma that played, and lost, to USC in the title game that USC has to vacate. So which school, if any, should be awarded the championship?
I’ll post my opinion later, so as not to skew the poll results.
Great, just what we need, another SEC football champion.
Vacant.
Such are the wages of sin (and not getting it done on the field).
War eagle!
Evidently no team fulfilled the championship’s requirements.
I always thought Auburn was a better team anyway.
I’m an Auburn alum ('97), and a huge fan. But I’m going to vote “no one”.
That year was the year that made me furious with the BCS system. There were three undefeated teams going in to the post season polls. All were from big conferences, so all had tough schedules. Auburn got left out even though I think we were the best team that year (our entire offensive backfield went top ten in the NFL draft). I think that we could have beat USC if we had a chance to play.
But who knows? I think we would have beat Oklahoma, but we never played them. USC screwed it up for everybody.
Going in to the post season, Oklahoma was ranked #2. They lost, and Auburn passed them in the polls because AU beat Virginia Tech. But I think Oklahoma might have been able to beat VT, too.
So, as an Auburn fan, I don’t want that championship. I want a god damn 4 or 8 team playoff.
Oklahoma didn’t lose since poof the championship game never happened, so that means both Oklahoma and Auburn were undefeated. Unless there is a way to re-rank the teams with that in mind and come up with a clear favorite, no one should win.
I am an Auburn fan (well at least it is the team I like most in the SEC) but IMO they should have been left out the 2004-05 Championship Game.
They played La Monroe, Citadel, and La Tech out of Conference that year. They made their bed, let them lie iin it. Oklahoma played Houston, Oregon, and Bowling Green. And USC played Notre Dame, Va Tech, BYU and Colorado St.
Auburn deserved to be the odd team out based on their OOC schedule.
The history-erasing is kind of silly to begin with, and retroactively saying someone else won would be worse. Leave it vacant.
That’s not the way it works. USC has to vacate the win, not the game. Oklahoma doesn’t lose the loss.
Surely the obvious answer is to replay all the games of that season except the USC games. Make it a reality show. Someone will create a channel to show them. People will watch them.
The whole damnatio memoriae thing doesn’t work for me. It happened, they won, and everybody knows it. They “vacated” the championship, and yet USC is still the champion for that year. The record books will reflect that they won it, even as they explain why it was “vacated”.
It’s not like USC suddenly loses recruits because of it. The sanctions on recruiting and scholarships (what an ironic name, given what they’re used for) will do far more to punish USC than taking away a championship that everybody knows they won.
For the record: I suspect that this is going to happen to Auburn’s championship as well. I’ve been known to make fun of the idea that Auburn’s championship will be vacated, but in truth it shouldn’t happen. Make a note of the cheating involved and let it stand at that.
No, replay the season on Madden 2005, or the college football equivalent. 
The Utah Utes should be retroactive 2004 National Champions, having gone 12-0 with a 35-7 Fiesta Bowl win over Pittsburgh and out of conference wins over TexasA&M, North Carolina and Arizona. The Utes were coached by Urban Meyer.
I think it should go to Auburn…to make up for the 2010 season BCS Championship that they will eventually vacate. 
The vacate nonsense does mean that, but I don’t buy into the NCAA’s method of whitewashing.
I voted to leave it vacant. Yeah, I think Auburn should have been in the BCS Championship game, but they weren’t. Who wants a trophy years after the fact? For a game they didn’t even play?
And I agree with the idea that anyone that watched that game knows what happened on the field. USC won in a blowout. They will be remembered as the Champions, even if that game is officially overlooked.
I think it should be LSU!!
…What?
All kidding aside, it should be left vacant. Auburn didn’t “win” anything that makes them BCS champs. The BCS championship was specifically set up to be the winner of a specific on-the-field match-up. There’d be more of a case if it were the old voting system. For example, the AP could re-vote based on the season of work (- USC). Auburn could then be the (mythical) college champs. In either case, Oklahoma doesn’t have any claim.
It should be noted that USC only has to vacate the BCS championship. The AP poll is a different entity and the sportswriters behind the AP poll have announced that USC will still be #1 for that year.