College Football Rankings (From Google)
Apr 30th, 2009 by GCR Editor
Can Google give us college football rankings? Of course it can! Google can rank anything.
And these rankings are unlike the ones you’ll find anywhere else.
First of all, when people in the United States talk about college football what they really mean is university football. So what can we discover if we search Google for the phrase university football? Well, the first thing we discover is that almost nothing that turns up really comes from either a college or a university—it’s all commercial marketing junk with hardly a .edu domain in the whole list. Wading through all that would severely tax our advanced bio-neural filtering system, so let’s make Google do the work and search for the phrase university football on .edu domains only. Now we’re getting somewhere:
- Tufts University Football
- Taylor University Football
- Bloomsburg University Football
- St. Lawrence University Football
- Harvard University Football
- Lawrence University Football
- DePauw University Football
- Ferris State University Football
- Hamline University Football
- Pittsburg State University Football
So what are we looking at here? Of course we’re not looking at a ranking of the teams, but at a ranking of football program websites. And the fact that none of the big names in “college” football appear here demonstrates that those big-name programs really aren’t part of the university, but are just independent commercial enterprises. At the universities listed above, the football programs are part of the regular campus like everything else. And that tells you that if you’re a good student who just happens to be really into playing football for the enjoyment of it, these schools may be ones you should consider.
And I confess I had to look some of them up to find out where they are: Tufts is a well-known university in Massachusetts; Taylor University is in Upland, Indiana; and Bloomsburg University is in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. Let’s get these teams together for a grand Google-league playoff!
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