As someone who used to only watch professional sports, one of the most confusing things for me once I began watching college sports was the rankings.
In professional sports, leagues create every team’s schedule and postseason participants are decided simply by which teams had the better record. Coming from this system, I was baffled seeing people argue why a college team that lost two games is better than an undefeated team.
In collegiate sports, rankings are decided by people. Instead of using systems and algorithms to determine what teams make the playoffs, a team’s postseason hopes solely rely on the opinion of a few people.
The committees in charge of determining national rankings will try to throw numbers in our faces, like strength of schedule or strength of record., They attempt to make it seem like they have a sophisticated system in place, but at the end of the day, they choose rankings depending on what they feel like.
Having humans determine rankings has inevitably created problems. Recently, the participating teams in the college football playoffs were announced, which created waves in the sports world.
Even for college fans outside of football, there have never been rankings that everyone could agree on. Not too long ago, I wrote an article about the volleyball ranking and complained that UCCS was not in.
In my opinion, as long as rankings come down to the opinions of a few people, college rankings will forever be broken.
Why not be like the pros?
One simple solution is for college sports to be like professional leagues: If your team has a better record than another team, then you are better than that team.
This works in professional sports where the talent between teams is generally small, and they do not choose their schedules.
Another quirk of college sports is that to an extent, teams get to choose their schedules. Football schedules, for example, consist of 12 games, eight of which are random opponents within a conference. The other four can be chosen by schools, leaving it up to them to fill their schedule with opponents.
Being able to hand-pick your opponents already throws a wrench in implementing a professional sports system, as every team would try to schedule the easiest opponents possible.
Compound this with the fact that the talent gap between teams is much larger in college sports, and it creates a situation where it is necessary to look beyond a team’s record. If we didn’t, teams that load their schedules with easy opponents would be rewarded, giving no incentive to schedule a hard opponent.
Stop rewarding brand recognition!
Now that we know how college rankings work, understand that my problem is not ranking teams above other teams with better records than them.
My problem lies with the people who decide the rankings, since they are swayed by prominent names in the sport they are ranking and hypothetical match outcomes.
When arguing about which teams should be ranked or make the playoffs, it will always be the fans of the big schools that will argue that no small school should be ranked above them for the fact that their school is more popular in the sport and a smaller school would hypothetically get destroyed in the playoffs.
I’ll give you a second to realize how ridiculous that argument is.
Unfortunately, this line of thinking expands to the very people who have the power to decide national rankings.
As a fan who keeps up with the rankings, it is clear when the committee sat around a table and said, “Well, Alabama has been good every year, so they deserve to be ranked above Tulane and James Madison, those schools have no history!”
I can imagine this was a similar thought process for volleyball rankings, as teams from the NSIC were favored because that conference has historically been prestigious in volleyball.
Admittedly, UCCS has also benefited from this line of thinking in cross-country and track and field, where the RMAC is seen as the most prestigious conference in Division II, helping out all teams in the conference when it comes to rankings.
This needs to stop as it factors in popularity into rankings, which is out of the control of the teams, as building popularity can take years or even decades.
It’s like when Arby’s releases a new menu item. Nobody is going to give it a fair shot; they’ll just say, “It’s Arby’s, how good could it be?” opposed to when McDonald’s releases a new item. everyone will try it due to popularity.
The difference is these are fast-food sandwiches while sports have stakes. There are coaches (and with NIL, now players too) being paid hundreds of thousands, if not millions, just to bring their team to the playoffs.
A team’s success, or lack thereof, could impact the decisions of incoming recruits. If a small school is denied a national ranking or a playoff spot, they might lose recruits who could help them grow.
The sad reality is, with teams being able to choose their schedules, humans will need to decide rankings. As long as those humans keep choosing the “name brand,” small schools are stuck in an impossible loop.
The simple solution to all of this is for the committees to start ranking with their brains, not their hearts.
A photo from last season of Hannes Saar with “aura”. Photo via The Scribe archive.