If nobody minds i'll just ask it here as it doesn't warrant it's own thread .
Does anyone know how the College Football rankings work ? Some games you see teams with a ranking beside their names and others not . So how do you get a ranking and is it based on current form or determined before the season starts ? And what is the benefit of a ranking ?
Only the top 25 teams are ranked. In the top tier of college ball (Football Bowl Subdivision, what used to be 1A ball) there are something like 120 teams in 12 conferences, so obviously they can't all play each other. So - get this - they basically have a weekly straw poll. Well, several straw polls. After eight weeks the official BCS (Bowl Championship Series) rankings come out. This is a mixture of two of the biggest polls (The Harris poll, which polls over a hundred ex coaches and players, journalists etc, and the Coaches' Poll, which is about sixty coaches from the top tier, polled by USA Today) and a system of different algorithms that compare various stats and schedule strength etc. The whole thing is a bit of a mess.
At the end of the season there are bowl games (there are usually about 30-35 of them. A team has to have at least a .500 record to qualify for one, and many bowls have contractual tie-ups with specific conferences. There are four big bowl games (Fiesta, Orange, Sugar, Rose) and a national championship game that make up the BCS. At the moment the biggest conferences (Big Ten, SEC, Big 12, ACC, Pac 12, Big East) have automatic qualification to these games, and there are a couple of "at-large" places. This is where the polls come in - the number 1 and number 2 teams at the end of the regular season play go to the national title game. Then the other BCS Bowl places are filled in according to qualification criteria. If you're a team not in one of the big conferences, you can still qualify by having a high enough place in the rankings (you need to be in the top 14 to be eligible, and if you're top 6 you get an automatic place) you can get a BCS spot too. This goes for independents too (i.e. Army, Navy, Notre Dame, and now BYU).
The rankings that you see at the moment (we've only had four games, so the BCS rankings aren't compiled yet) are the AP Poll and the Coaches Poll, depending on where you see them. ESPN also have their own rankings, but only they give a shit about that.
So, that's all pretty complicated. And it's all set to change again. From 2014 there will be a playoff system to replace the national title game. They haven't published the exact details (and what they have released makes it look like a bigger stitch up than it already is), but basically the top four teams will be slotted into two of the big bowl games which will act as semi finals for a new National Title game. There will still be a rankings system, but the four semi finalists will be chosen by a "BCS Board", whatever the fuck that's supposed to be. Carnage will inevitable ensue.
Also, hi everyone.