College football should implement a ranking system similar to FIFA

Jan 20, 2022, 3:05 PM

FIFA, the world’s governing body of soccer has some similarities to the set up as NCAA football:

- One they both deal with a large amount of teams, much more than most professional sports leagues around the world. FIFA has 211 member teams and NCAA has 130 FBS teams.

- Also, where NCAA football is broken up into conferences, FIFA is divided into 5 confederations based on geographic region/continent.

- Like in the college football where most of the time teams are playing other teams in their conference, in FIFA most games are played between teams within a confederation and because of this there is lots of debate over which confederations/conferences are better than others.

- In both sports, players mostly stay with the same team throughout their careers. Though this seems to be changing a bit with the transfer portal in college football for most of the history of college football is correct. I’m FIFA there are rules based on citizenship and nationality as to which countries players can play for.

One big difference though is how they rank their teams. FIFA has used a ranking system since the 1990s and it is based on a very simple yet objective formula. FIFA teams either earn or lose points after each game they play. This formula takes the weight of a game into consideration (I.e. a game competing for a trophy is worth more than a friendly/scrimmage). It also takes into account the team you are playing based on their ranking, and the result. If you win in regulation time you get more points than if you win in a shootout.

I think the NCAA would be great with a system like this. It would eliminate the subjectivity of a playoff committee and the clear and simply defined equation would make things very objective. If you play another FBS team you would get more points than if you played and beat an FCS team. This would incentivize teams to add less cupcake games to the schedule. Also instead of completely subjective rankings at the beginning of a season when teams haven’t played a game, points would carry over from the previous year…

Sorry I might be rambling on. College football is over and I was thinking of random things to talk about.

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College football should implement a ranking system similar to FIFA

FIFA rankings are largely regarded as a joke by soccer

Since the make-up of college teams can be very different...

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