College Team Rankings

Today's Pepsi Team Invitational at Oregon features the men's teams that tied for second at the NCAA Indoor Championships, and the women's teams that took first and fifth, in a small-meet team-scoring format. In any other sport, this would be a Joe Biden-style Big F***ing Deal. But in track...meh. Why?

I think partly because there's nothing really at stake here. There should be. I don't mean like it is in college football, where the loser of such a high-ranking matchup essentially forfeits a chance at the national championship. I mean like in college basketball, where the post-season means that regular-season matchups are exciting but ultimately only put rankings on the line.

In college track, we have team rankings put out by the USTFCCCA. And they're lame, because they only total up relative strength of marks. Who wins or loses a scored meet is of absolutely no consequence. Ergo, today's meet means diddly-squat.

So I'm going to fix that. I'm going to release weekly rankings based almost exclusively on the results of scored meets.

Outdoor means more than indoor. Recent means more than longer ago. The difference between first and second in a meet means more than between second and third, which is more than third and fourth, and so on. In a large scored meet, teams that don't score at least 30 points are all tied for last (which means only the top five or so places at the NCAA meet matter).

Men's rankings, as of April 9...
1. Florida
2. Texas A&M
3. Arkansas
4. LSU
5. Oregon
6. Oklahoma
7. Nebraska
8. Minnesota
9. UCLA
10. Ohio State
11. South Carolina
12. Georgia
13. Stanford
14. Baylor
15. Florida State
16. Texas
17. Cal
18. Texas Tech
19. North Carolina
20. BYU