What's the difference between the AP Poll, the Coaches Poll and the CFP rankings?

The AP Poll is voted on by a panel of sportswriters and broadcasters and has run since 1936. The Coaches Poll is voted on by a panel of FBS head coaches and is sponsored by USA Today. Neither poll picks the College Football Playoff field. The CFP rankings are released by a selection committee starting midway through the season and are the only rankings that actually determine which teams make the Playoff and how they're seeded.

Why does a game show TV: TBD?

Networks don't announce every broadcast assignment when a schedule is first released. Many late-season NFL games are flexed to a different window or network based on how the season is playing out, and some college matchups aren't assigned a network until roughly two weeks out. TV: TBD means no broadcaster has been announced yet, not that the game lacks one.

Guide

How to read an NFL and college football schedule

Q: How many teams make the College Football Playoff?

The 2026-27 College Football Playoff has 12 teams. Automatic qualifiers include the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC champions and the highest-ranked team from the American, Conference USA, MAC, Mountain West, Pac-12 or Sun Belt. Notre Dame qualifies automatically if ranked in the CFP top 12. At-large selections fill the remaining places. Seeds 1-4 receive first-round byes.

Standings, polls and TV assignments follow different rules in the NFL and in college football. Here's what's actually behind the numbers on this site.

The NFL: 32 teams, one clean bracket

The NFL splits into two conferences, the AFC and the NFC, each with four divisions - North, South, East and West - of four teams apiece. Every team plays 17 games across an 18-week season, with one bye week off somewhere in the middle. Because the whole league is built on that same 4-division grid, "standings" means the same thing everywhere: win-loss-tie record within a division that everyone can compare directly.

The playoff field is seven teams per conference: the four division winners, seeded 1 through 4 by record, plus three wild-card teams filling seeds 5 through 7. Only the #1 seed gets a first-round bye; everyone else plays from the wild-card round on. When two or more teams finish with identical records, the league works through a published tiebreaker order - head-to-head result first, then division record, then common opponents, then conference record, then strength of victory and strength of schedule - until the tie breaks.

College football: no single bracket, and that's by design

The FBS - the top tier of college football - includes teams across multiple conferences plus independents, and there's no league-wide division structure tying them all together the way the NFL's is. Conferences set their own scheduling and championship-game format, and most of the largest conferences have moved away from geographic divisions in recent realignment, deciding their conference champion from a single combined standings table instead.

That's also why a college team's "record" only tells you so much on its own - strength of schedule, conference affiliation and head-to-head results against other ranked teams all factor into how a team is viewed nationally in a way that a division-standings table alone can't capture.

The College Football Playoff

The 2026-27 College Football Playoff uses a 12-team field. The ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC champions qualify automatically, along with the highest-ranked team from the American, Conference USA, MAC, Mountain West, Pac-12 or Sun Belt. Notre Dame qualifies automatically if it finishes in the CFP top 12; the remaining places go to at-large selections. Seeds 1-4 receive byes, while seeds 5-12 play in the first round. See the official CFP format for the current selection and seeding rules.

AP Poll vs. Coaches Poll vs. CFP rankings - they're not the same thing

College football has three rankings running at once, and mixing them up is an easy mistake:

The AP Poll is voted on by a panel of sportswriters and broadcasters. It's been published since 1936, runs from a preseason edition through the final poll of the year, and carries no official role in who makes the Playoff - it's a media ranking, not a selection tool.
The Coaches Poll works the same way but its voters are a panel of FBS head coaches, and it's sponsored by USA Today. Like the AP Poll, it doesn't determine the Playoff field.
The CFP rankings are the only ones that matter for qualification. A selection committee releases them starting midway through the season, and the final release sets both the 12-team field and its seeding. If you're trying to figure out who's actually in playoff position, this is the poll to watch, not the AP or Coaches poll.

What "TV: TBD" actually means

Not every broadcast is locked in when a schedule is first published. Some late-season NFL games are flexed onto a different network or kickoff window depending on how the season is shaping up, and plenty of college matchups don't get a network assignment until roughly two weeks out, once conferences and broadcasters finalize their weekly picks. On One Page Season, a TV: TBD chip means exactly that and nothing more - no network has been announced yet. We never guess a channel just to fill the space; when the real assignment is announced, it appears automatically the next time the page refreshes.

Kickoff times, in your own timezone

Broadcast schedules are typically built and announced in U.S. Eastern time, which is easy to get wrong at a glance if you're not on the East Coast. Every kickoff time on this site is converted to whatever timezone your device is set to, so a 1:00 PM ET game correctly shows as 10:00 AM if you're on the Pacific coast, with no manual conversion required. The footer timezone selector lets you override that if you're checking a game for somewhere other than where you are.

Getting the most out of One Page Season

Add the NFL and college teams you follow on the My Season page and their regular-season games, kickoff times, TV assignments and results are brought together, sorted into one chronological list. From there you can export it as a calendar file or subscribe to a feed that updates itself, so a flexed kickoff or a newly announced network reaches your calendar without you doing anything.

For how the site itself is built and where the data comes from, see the About page.