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Voted other and will go slightly before the 70's with 1966 Bama. Two time defending NC goes undefeated and finishes third to ND and MSU who played to a 10-10 tie. Keith Dunnavant wrote a book ('The Missing Ring') about the season.

"The Missing Ring is more than a football book. It is both a story of a changing era and of an extraordinary team on a championship quest."

https://www.amazon.com/Missing-Ring-Alabama-Crimson-Footballs/dp/0312374321

I've always read that it had to do with black folks getting hit with billy clubs, firehoses, police dogs, bullets, and the like when they marched for civil rights.  The Bama football team was getting punished for the sins of Alabama and the rest of the Deep South.

I always think they get lost in the shuffle, behind that version of the Game of the Century.  Glad someone wrote a book about it.  Imagine playing on that '66 Bama team and someone says you're the 3rd-best team.  I'd tell them to F-off, lol.

The AP Pollsters were determined that Bama would not repeat. Although they had Bama #1 in the Preseason Poll, they had dropped them to #3 before Bama had played a game. In no small part because of the 13th hour replacement of an SEC opponent with a non-1A opponent for the opener.

Tulane was scheduled to be the opening game opponent, but asked to be removed from the schedule when they left the conference on June 1. 1966. They were replaced that Summer by La Tech, a non-1A at the time.

http://www.collegepollarchive.com/football/ap/seasons.cfm?appollid=310#.XpZYMv1KiUk

Furthermore, they even dropped Bama to #4 in the third week's Poll. Unbelievable because the consensus public mindset during that era was that a #1 team remained #1 until they were beaten.

http://www.collegepollarchive.com/football/ap/seasons.cfm?appollid=312#.XpZcFP1KiUk

Coach Bryant was on record as saying it was the best team he ever had. 

That's difficult to say, because it's less a regional bias thing and more of a full-schedule, stability thing.
In the 1800s, college football was all Ivy League.  They were good, but they also played a full schedule (8-9-10 games).  No one else did.  So you'd have midwestern, southern, and western teams going 4-0 or 5-0 or whatever, but they were unknown commodities and didn't get the benefit of the doubt because they played relatively few games.
So the midwestern schools forming the Big Ten in 1896 and just 5 years later, Michigan is a RECOGNIZED national power.
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Now teams in the south and west were then playing 7-8-9 games, but not getting any play.  The midwest had Michigan, Chicago, Illinois, ND......the east still had the Ivies going strong, plus Pitt. (the Ivies weren't "The Ivy League" as a conference, but they all played each other and were good)
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More conferences begin (1905-1915), in the plains, the SWC, and out west.  Western teams like early 20s Cal, Stanford, and USC became a power before the south got any due.  GA Tech was recognized in 1917, but that was a WWI thing. 
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The Southern Conference began in 1922, so you could point to that being the thing that kept them down as much as being socially backwards. 
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Another aspect was travel/money.  Remember, football didn't exactly have permanence early on.  T.Roosevelt had to intervene to keep it going early in the 1900s.  So we couldn't criticize a school if it didn't want to pay for its team to hop a train to travel very far.  
Looking at schedules back then, the southern and western teams were very regional.  They had to be.  The furthest I see teams travelling pre-1920 is Texas playing Alabama and Auburn.  West coast teams were exclusively regional until the Rose Bowl began.  It was the Rose Bowl, and beating those credible Big Ten school that allowed the west coast schools to get respect earlier than the southern schools.
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The midwest schools who happened to sort of bet on football remaining a thing traveled east - playing the likes of Pitt and some even crossing the Appalachians, playing Virginia, Penn, Syracuse and Yale.  I really think the birth of the helmet program was with those schools willing to travel.  ND played @Nebraska, @Army, and @Texas in 1915.  Why was little Vanderbilt the SEC's first power?  They played Michigan for a few consecutive years, raising their notoriety.  GA Tech played ND.  It was all about money-travel-exposure-respect.
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Well the Southern Conference (precursor to the SEC) lacked moderation.  It had like 20 teams, so scheduling would still be wildly imbalanced. 
But yeah, like in the 50s, Tulane was in the SEC and they had a different number of conference games every year.  

Lebron gets around.

It must have been some other LeBron James, because he wasn't even born until 1984.