1. Ballot points
Each ranked position has a simple point value.
A No. 1 placement is worth 25 points, No. 2 is worth 24, and so on through No. 25, which is worth 1 point. Teams left off a ballot receive no ranked entry from that ballot.
CFB methodology
How the Rankrly College Football ranking is calculated.
Rankrly is a fan-consensus poll. The public ranking is calculated from submitted Top 25 ballots for the selected season period. Game results, schedules, résumés, predictions, and external polls can provide context on the site, but they are not direct inputs to the Rankrly consensus score.
2. Outlier control
Extreme placements are winsorized before scoring.
For each team, Rankrly finds the 15th and 85th percentile of submitted ranks. Placements outside that range are pulled back to the nearest boundary before ballot points are averaged. This reduces the influence of isolated extreme rankings without deleting the ballot.
3. Ballot coverage
Being ranked by more voters matters.
The team's average winsorized ballot points are multiplied by a coverage factor: (ballots ranking the team + 1) divided by (all ballots in the period + 2). That modest shrinkage prevents a team ranked highly on only a small number of ballots from being treated the same as a broadly supported team.
4. Final ordering
The final score is the primary ranking input.
Teams are ordered by final score from highest to lowest. If two teams have exactly the same score, the established public ordering uses school name alphabetically, then team ID only as a final deterministic fallback. Those tie rules do not add or subtract ranking points.
What this page does not change
This is a read-only explanation of the current characterized CFB ranking behavior. It does not change ranking formulas, weights, score precision, ballot interpretation, tie-breaking, publication timing, or historical output. Any future scoring change should update both the implementation and this explanation together under explicit review.