Most sports can be summed up in a table. College football cannot. An FBS team plays about twelve regular-season games, and most of the other teams in the division never appear on its schedule, so there is no common table to climb. Where a team stands is shown by rankings, and the national champion is decided by a 12-team Playoff. The section follows that shape: a schedule, two main polls, and an explanation of how they connect.
Week by week, from the opener to the bowls
The schedule page opens on the next week that still has games to play and marks it Next up. At the top, arrows step to the previous and the next week, and a strip of numbered links jumps to any other. Every week is its own page, such as Week 10, so a link shared in a group chat lands on the week you meant. The tag moves on to the following week as soon as every game of the current one has finished. Once the postseason matchups are set, a final Bowls & Playoff page is added for the bowl games and the Playoff rounds.
Reading a game row
Games are grouped by day, with kick-off times in US Eastern on a 24-hour clock; a game whose time has not been set shows TBD. The stadium appears under each matchup. A finished game swaps the kick-off time for the score and a Full time tag, so a past week works as a results page. A number such as #7 in front of a team's name is its ranking, which makes a top-ten game easy to spot in a Saturday slate of dozens of games without a trip to the polls.
Not every team on the page is in the FBS. Many FBS teams schedule an FCS opponent, and those games appear like any other; the rankings page carries the FCS coaches' poll for them. Week numbers follow the sport's own calendar, so in 2026 Week 1 runs from the opening Saturday, August 29, through the Labor Day weekend, and the opening-weekend games sit inside it.
The polls on the rankings page
The rankings page shows the AP Top 25 and the AFCA Coaches Poll, followed by the coaches' polls for FCS, Division II and Division III. Each table lists rank, team, record, poll points and a Trend column: ▲ and ▼ show how many places a team has moved since the previous poll, and a dash means it has not moved. In the preseason polls every record is 0-0.
The two main polls are opinions, counted in a fixed way. In the AP poll, sportswriters and broadcasters each rank 25 teams; a first-place vote is worth 25 points, second place 24, and so on down to one point for 25th, and the totals set the order. The AP releases its football poll on Sundays during the season. The Coaches Poll is voted by a panel of FBS head coaches, all of them members of the American Football Coaches Association. A team can rise without playing if the teams above it lose, and the points column shows how close two neighbors are.
From the polls to the Playoff
The polls do not choose the Playoff. A 13-member selection committee does, and it publishes its own top 25 each Tuesday in the second half of the regular season. The field has 12 teams:
- The champions of the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC.
- The highest-ranked team from the American, Conference USA, the MAC, the Mountain West, the Pac-12 and the Sun Belt, whether or not it wins its conference.
- Notre Dame, if it ranks in the top 12 on selection day.
- The highest-ranked remaining teams, for the other places.
The four highest-ranked teams receive a first-round bye, and the other eight play first-round games at campus sites. In 2026 the field is announced on Sunday, December 6, the first round is played on December 18 and 19, and the national title game is on January 25, 2027, at Allegiant Stadium in the Las Vegas area. The bowl games that host the later rounds are added to the Bowls & Playoff page as their matchups are set.
What the section reports, and what it leaves out
The section reports who plays when, what happened and how the polls responded. It also has a Playoff predictor, which is a different kind of tool from a season simulator. Other sports have a rule that turns results into places, such as points in a soccer league or records in the NFL, but here the places come from a committee's judgment. So the predictor starts from the committee's latest ranking, labels its projection as an estimate and lets you overrule it. The methodology page explains how it works.
More on the polls and the Playoff
- How many losses a Playoff team can have: every team's record in the four-team and the 12-team eras.
- How accurate the AP preseason poll is: how much of the August Top 25 is still ranked when the season ends.
- College football national champions: every AP, coaches' poll, BCS and Playoff champion.
Free, with no account. Schedules, scores and polls come from live sports data feeds and update as games finish and new polls are released.