Now that the coronavirus pandemic has all but canceled spring practice and could threaten the upcoming college football season, there's plenty of time to debate the nation's best teams over the past two decades, a stretch that has included several of our game's all-time best champions.

Since 1998, the start of college football's Bowl Championship Series leading into the Playoff era, we've seen 12 different programs win titles. The lack of parity at the top enrages some, but has made for several all-time clashes in the final game that will stand the test of time as we enter the next decade during the 2020 season.

Alabama has been the national standard for excellence since Nick Saban's arrival in Tuscaloosa, but Dabo Swinney's Tigers have continued their meteoric rise and appear to be overtaking the title of juggernaut at the top. How many of his best teams compare to Mack Brown's Texas in the mid 2000s or Miami's dominance at the turn of the century?

Slotting top teams during that stretch is subjective, so one way to properly categorize top-ranked squads by strength is to pull from a different, more objective property — Jeff Sagarin's computer model. Sagarin's rankings were one of six polls used in creating the computer average during the BCS era, which made up one-third of the postseason structure's algorithm.

According to Sagarin's Computer Ratings, here are the best college football teams of the BCS-Playoff Era (since 1998):