How it works
Methodology
A school's score rewards two things: winning (how high each team finishes nationally) and breadth (how many sports it sponsors, with popular sports counting more).
1. A 10–100 index for every team
For each sport and season we take the final national ranking of every Division I team, after the postseason. The champion's poll or championship result sets the top of the list, and a full computer ranking (NET, RPI, Massey, KRACH and others) orders the rest. Every rank links to its source.
Ranking Index = 100 − (rank − 1) ÷ (teams − 1) × 90
#1 gets 100 and last place gets 10, so every team still gets some credit for competing at the Division I level.
Teams missing from the published rankings
Some sports only publish a top 25 or top 75, and track's official team ranking covers only the teams that score at the NCAA meet. Teams below that line get an estimated rank, marked est. wherever it appears. Published ranks never move: every estimated team is placed below the last published one.
- Track and field: a virtual meet built from the final national performance lists (TFRRS). In every event, the nation's best mark scores 300 points, the next 299, and so on down to the 300th. A team's points across all events and athletes decide its order. This is close to how the coaches' association rates teams.
- Other sports (tennis, swimming, rowing, cross country, beach volleyball and others): conference results, adjusted for how strong the conference is.
estimate = conference strength × (1 − finish ÷ 2) finish = (conference place − 1) ÷ (teams in the conference − 1) 0 = first, 1 = last strength = (conference's average published Ranking Index in the sport − 10) ÷ 90
A champion gets its conference's full strength and the last-place team half of it. A conference's order is never flipped: its champion always stays above its runner-up. But a strong conference's middle finishers can land above a weak conference's champion.
A school that sponsors a sport but has no ranking, conference result or performance data is assumed to sit somewhere in the places left over, so it gets the average of those places.
Seasons in progress
The current season is updated every evening. Each sport is ranked on the best information available so far, shown as a badge on the Sports page:
- In season: the current poll for the top, then the current computer ranking (such as NET or RPI) once one is published.
- Preseason: the preseason poll, for sports that haven't started yet.
- Last season: the previous season's final order, for sports with no preseason ranking yet.
Teams the current rankings don't cover yet keep their place from last season's final order, marked prev., below the teams that are currently ranked. When a sport's championship is decided, its ranking becomes final.
2. Weighting each sport by popularity
Each sport gets a weight, with football at 100. The weight averages up to three measures of how much the sport matters, each compared with football:
- Revenue: total Division I revenue for the sport. Available for every sport; details below.
- Attendance: total Division I attendance in a season, from the NCAA's attendance records. Only football, men's and women's basketball, and men's ice hockey publish a national total.
- TV viewers: average audience for the national championship final, from Nielsen figures reported by the networks and Sports Media Watch. Published for 18 sports.
signal score = 100 × √(sport's value ÷ football's value) weight = average of the signal scores that exist for the sport
The square root keeps the big money sports from drowning out everything else. Football brings in about 55 times as much money as women's rowing, but national excellence in rowing should still count for something. When a measure isn't published for a sport, the weight averages the measures that are.
How revenue is measured
Revenue comes from the U.S. Department of Education's Equity in Athletics (EADA) data. Every college that receives federal student aid must report its athletics revenue team by team each year. We use the 2024-25 report, the latest available, and add up each sport's revenue across all 358 schools classified as NCAA Division I in it.
- What counts as revenue: everything a school reports for the team. That includes ticket sales, media rights and conference payouts, donations, NCAA distributions, and the money the school itself puts into the team from its own budget and student fees.
- A caveat: for most sports other than football and basketball, the school's own support is the largest part of that revenue. For those sports the figure reflects how much schools invest in the sport as much as how much fans spend on it, which is one reason it's averaged with attendance and TV viewers.
- Sports that EADA groups together: track and field and cross country are reported as one team, so each gender's total is split evenly across cross country, indoor track and outdoor track. Swimming and diving are combined. Rifle, fencing and skiing count men's, women's and coed revenue together, since they're coed sports.
For scale: football's total is $7.27 billion, men's basketball $2.38 billion (a revenue score of 57) and women's basketball $958 million (36).
Search interest (Google Trends) was planned as a fourth measure but isn't included yet, because a consistent comparison across all sports couldn't be collected.
3. The overall score
Score = Σ (Ranking Index × weight) for sports the school sponsors
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Σ weight (sponsored) + 0.5 × Σ weight (not sponsored)
Not sponsoring a sport costs a school, but only 50% of that sport's weight. A school that skips football gives up 50 points of possible weight, not the full 100. Breadth still matters, but a school that does a few sports very well isn't buried by the sports it doesn't play.
There are three versions of the score:
- Men's: men's and coed sports.
- Women's: women's and coed sports.
- Combined: every sport once, men's, women's and coed together. Because women's sports are weighted by their own popularity, a dominant women's basketball or softball program moves the combined score a lot.