Jeff Shain sat in the New York office of the United Press International on Wednesday, Jan. 2, 1991, waiting for a phone call. He was UPI’s lead college football editor and the coordinator of the American Football Coaches Association Coaches Poll. It was past the deadline promised to its wire-service clients for the story and results of the final poll of the college football season, the one that would determine their national champion.
Fifty eight votes had been cast. One remained outstanding. The current tally was a dead heat – 822 points for Colorado, 822 points for Georgia Tech.
“One coach, we could not locate,” Shain said. “When we were about five votes shy, we made some calls. With the exception of one, it was a quick turnaround (getting those ballots). We had all but one. Then the wait began.”
The Associated Press had named Colorado its national champion earlier in the day. The night before, the Buffaloes survived a tense 10-9 battle in the Orange Bowl over No. 5 Notre Dame to cap an 11-1-1 season. Georgia Tech came in as AP's No. 2 after blowing out Nebraska 45-21 in the Citrus Bowl to finish as the nation’s only undefeated team at 11-0-1. The AP’s vote was not particularly close, with Colorado getting 39 first-place votes to Georgia Tech’s 20 and Miami’s one.
Still, Georgia Tech coach Bobby Ross had made his case after the Citrus Bowl that his team deserved a national championship, and the Citrus Bowl scoreboard apparently agreed. A split national championship was a bit of a long shot, but it was on the table.
Almost every college football season can earn the label ‘wild’ in some form, but the final 30 hours of 1990 were as outlandish as they come. The climactic scenes played out in Orlando, Fla., Miami, the Denver airport, New York, Virginia, the Atlanta airport and finally a Georgia Tech basketball game.
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Georgia Tech finishes undefeated
The Yellow Jackets entered the Citrus Bowl No. 2 in both polls and the only undefeated major conference team. They were facing No. 19 Nebraska, fresh off a 45-10 loss to Oklahoma. Yet Georgia Tech was a 2-point underdog.
Dating back to the previous season, Georgia Tech was 17-1-1 in its last 19 games and had beaten nationally ranked teams South Carolina, Clemson and Virginia in 1990. The 41-38 win in November at Virginia, who was ranked No. 1 at the time, pushed Georgia Tech into the top 10 and it continued to rise from there. As the ACC champion, the Jackets were required to go to the Citrus Bowl where they would face a 9-2 Huskers team.
Kicking off early at midday on Tuesday, Jan. 1, Georgia Tech jumped out to a 21-0 lead midway through the second quarter before Nebraska closed to within 24-21 at the end of the third. Two William Bell touchdown runs, his second and third of the game, put the game away for the Jackets in the fourth quarter. Georgia Tech walked off with a 45-21 win and an 11-0-1 record, its first undefeated season since 1952.
Nebraska coach Tom Osborne, who had played Colorado in November, said he thought Georgia Tech was the better team after the Citrus Bowl.
The plan for Georgia Tech was to gather and watch Tuesday night’s Orange Bowl from the Peabody Hotel in Orlando before going back to Atlanta on Wednesday. Their rooting interest would be for Notre Dame, of course, which was looking to beat Colorado in the Orange Bowl for the second straight year.
Ross, however, flew to his native Virginia to be with his mother Martha, who was recovering from a stroke suffered just before Georgia Tech left for Orlando. Coordinators Ralph Friedgen and George O’Leary were left in charge of the squad.
“For that one night, I was singing the praises of Notre Dame,” said Georgia Tech’s star safety Ken Swilling. “There’s no doubt.”
Colorado survives a scare
In Miami, the mission was crystal clear for Colorado.
“We had some unfinished business from the previous year,” said Rick George, who was Colorado’s recruiting coordinator in 1990 and now serves as its athletic director. “We had a perfect season, but we got beat by Notre Dame. So there was a lot that we still had to prove, and I think we were more focused on that than we were concerned about Georgia Tech blowing out Nebraska.”
The betting line was even, and the game played out that way. It was a defensive struggle, and Colorado eventually built a 10-9 lead thanks to an Eric Bieniemy third-quarter touchdown and an early blocked extra point suffered by Notre Dame.
With just over one minute to play, Notre Dame star Raghib ‘Rocket’ Ismail returned a punt 91 yards for a would-be touchdown, setting off a wild celebration at the Peabody hotel in Orlando, but a clipping penalty negated the score and enabled Colorado to hang on for the win.
“I'm sitting in front of the TV and everybody's like, come on, Notre Dame. And I said, ‘Rocket's gonna give us one’,” Swilling said. “The whole hotel shook, it seemed like. Tech people on every floor erupted.”
“The place just exploded because it's a big atrium,” said then-Georgia Tech SID Mike Finn. “And then when the flag came out, it exploded again in a different way.”
Georgia Tech kicker Scott Sisson, who had won the Virginia game with a field goal with seven seconds left, had returned to his room late in the game. He watched Ismail's punt return on the edge of his bed.
"I could feel the floor shaking. It felt like an earthquake," he said. "And then they called it back. It was awful."
Colorado players exited the Orange Bowl field waving No. 1s and wearing national championship shirts, confident the school’s first title was theirs. It has been a trying season, with the team tying Tennessee 31-31 in the Pigskin Classic opener, losing 23-22 to Illinois on Sept. 15, and then incredibly winning at Missouri 33-31 in October when officials mistakenly gave the Buffaloes five downs in the final seconds. The debatable Ismail flag gave more fuel to those who might have been on the fence regarding Colorado’s worthiness of being No. 1.
Bob Costas, who was part of the NBC broadcast in Miami, had no doubts, however.
“Based on precedent, it would be outrageous for anyone other than Colorado to be No. 1,” he said that night. “They began the weekend as the top-ranked team, then beat a very strong Notre Dame team. With this victory, I’m almost certain they will emerge as something close to a unanimous No. 1, with Georgia Tech likely to take the No. 2 spot.”
The Associated Press backed that up the next morning, announcing Colorado as its champ with 39 first-place votes and 1,475 points. Georgia Tech had 20 first-place votes and 1,441 points. However, four AP voters flipped from Colorado to Georgia Tech after the bowl games. Would there be more flipping from the coaches?
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The waiting game in New York
The coaches poll did not have full participation each week during the regular season. In fact, the final poll before the bowls, just 47 of the 59 coaches submitted ballots. Shain made it clear to the participating coaches full participation would be mandatory for the final vote after the Orange Bowl.
“If the tally wasn't going to be adversely affected, especially early in the season, and coaches were on recruiting trips or got tied up, we would go with blank ballots,” Shain said. ”But everybody kind of knew that this was building to a head. So our message was, ‘Come on, coaches, let's get our ballots in.’”
Shain stayed at the office into the early morning hours to handle any ballots that came in from coaches who were ready to cast. After a few hours at home, when the overnight UPI desk took some ballots by fax and phone, Shain was back at his desk and realized this vote was going to be very close as the ballots started to all file in. Several coaches had flipped from Colorado to Georgia Tech after all was said and done.
“I think (some of the coaches) probably were hoping we would lose, so that would make their decision about the fifth down easier,” said Gerry DiNardo, Colorado’s offensive coordinator in 1990, who felt that controversial win bothered some in the profession.
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Shain wrote a 100- to 200-word story with Colorado as the coaches’ national champ, and a 100- to 200-word story with Georgia Tech as the coaches’ national champ. Both were ready for the broadcast news wire, typically sent to radios and television stations.
UPI’s deadline passed, and there was nothing to do but wait until the phone finally rang.
“It was the head coach himself,” Shain remembers. “I said, ‘Hey, coach, how are you doing? Glad you called. We've been really waiting for your ballot. What's your vote?’”
With staffers crowded around him, Shain typed in ‘Georgia Tech’ on his computer for the first line, and the race to get the news out began. This was 1991, of course, which means for virtually all Americans, there was no email, no internet, no cell phones.
Colorado spent the night in Miami celebrating after the Orange Bowl, then spent some time at the hotel pool before gathering and heading to the airport for the flight home. When the team landed at Stapleton Airport in Denver, then-Colorado Sports Information Director David Plati found a pay phone and called Shain in New York for the results. His head dropped when told Colorado was No. 2, and then it was his job to tell head coach Bill McCartney.
“I slink over to Coach Mac and (athletic director) Bill Marolt, I go, ‘Uh, guys, Georgia Tech got us by 1 point.’ And Mac just turned red in the face. ‘That's not right. That's not right. You call them back and tell them to do a revote.’ I said, ‘Mac that's not gonna happen.’”
Bobby Ross becomes a champion by himself
Meanwhile in Atlanta, Finn had been monitoring the voting after returning from the Citrus Bowl. The rest of his staff was preparing for a home men’s basketball game against Marist that night, but he was calling UPI repeatedly and getting updates as the votes were coming in.
Finally, he got the official word.
“I started yelling, (SID assistant) Frank Zang started yelling, we’re all just yelling in the office,” Finn said.
Ross, however, could not be reached. He was scheduled to fly commercial to Atlanta after visiting his mother in Virginia, but while he was waiting for his flight, a charter pilot recognized him and asked if he wanted to fly to Atlanta with his crew. They had just dropped off passengers and were returning to Atlanta with an empty plane. They would be happy to have him come aboard.
Ross said OK, and while in flight, he was told by the pilots the UPI vote came in and Georgia Tech was No. 1.
The Atlanta media was eager for his reaction, so Finn had them go out to Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International airport to meet Ross when he landed. The problem was, he wasn’t on the flight he was supposed to be on.
“Finally, we ran him down and did an impromptu press conference in front of those ticket booths at Hartsfield,” Finn said. “It was a pretty wild night.”
Swilling said he was asleep in his dorm room after arriving back from Orlando when a friend woke him up with the news. The players who were around gathered at the athletics center, then went to the basketball game that night to watch Kenny Anderson lead a group that was hoping to get back to the Final Four for a second straight season.
At the basketball game, many Georgia Tech fans heard the news for the first time via the P.A. announcer, who announced during a timeout early in the game the football team shared the national championship with Colorado.
Thirty-five years later, the teams will finally meet
On Friday night, Georgia Tech will visit Colorado and face the Buffaloes for the first time to kick off the 2025 season on ESPN. Both teams are unranked but believe they have what it takes to be a factor in their respective conference races.
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It is the matchup some were calling for in the days after the split decision, one that of course never took place. Both schools proudly feature their version of the 1990 national championship trophy in their football facilities and commemorate the achievement with reunions and celebrations.
Did missing out on a unanimous championship take some of the shine off the title for Colorado?
“No, it really didn't,” George said. “We won a national championship, and, yeah, we were disappointed that we didn't get the coaches' vote, but we were extremely excited to win the first football national championship at Colorado. We didn't let it overshadow. Certainly, it was disappointing, but we won a national championship and we're celebrating that to this day.”