2018 NAIA football rankings

The 2018 NAIA football rankings reports the poll results conducted during the 2018 NAIA football season. Each season, one poll evaluates the various National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) football teams and ranks them. Coaches from each of the football conferences are members of a selection panel, with conferences receiving one vote for every 4 member teams. Sometimes referred to as the football ratings or the NAIA Coaches' Poll, the poll is generally conducted once during the preseason and after each week of play during the regular season.

The Top 25 is determined by compiling points for each vote. A team receives 25 points for each first-place vote, 24 for second-place and so on through the list. The highest and lowest ranking for each team (counting zero for ballots with no votes for a team) are disregarded. To obtain the final tally, each team’s ranking is recalculated with an additional point added to each team for every ballot (including discounted ballots) that includes the team.^[1]

As an example, if there are 16 voting panelists, and one team is a unanimous choice for the highest ranking, then that team would receive 25 points * 14 ballots + 16 points (one for each ballot cast) = 366 points.

Teams that receive only one point in the ballot are not considered “receiving votes.”

Once the regular season is completed, the NAIA will conduct a playoff to determine the year's national champion. A final poll will be taken after completion of the series of playoff games, collectively referred to as the 2018 NAIA Football National Championship.

Poll release dates

The NAIA released a preseason edition of the rankings on August 6, 2018. A complete schedule of poll release dates will be:^[2]

Week by week poll

* preseason rankings include prior season won-loss records

Projecting the postseason

A 16-team tournament will be contested to determine who wins the 2018 NAIA Football National Championship. Teams will be selected to the field of participants through a two-tiered selection process. First, any conference champion ranked in the top 20 positions in the final regular-season Coaches' Poll will receive an automatic bid into the tourney field. In 2018, there are 12 NAIA conferences (or divisions within large conferences) that have champions who will receive this invitation:

After the automatic bids are granted, any open positions in the field will be filled with at-large invitations. These at-large entries are granted to the highest ranked teams who were not conference champions. Since there will be 12 conference champions, a minimum of four at-large invitations will be granted to play in the 2108 tournament.

This projection recognizes the reality that standings can change dramatically before the final regular-season poll. Therefore, for all polls before Week 8, this projection simply assigns the automatic bid to the highest ranked team from each conference/division, regardless of where that team sits in the actual current league standings. From Week 8 until the end of the season, the automatic bid will be projected to the top team in each league.

Based on the Week 5 Coaches' Poll, the following teams are projected to make up the 2018 playoff field:

Leading vote-getters

Since the inception of the Coaches' Poll in 1999, the #1 ranking in the various weekly polls has been held by only a select group of teams. Through the Week 5 poll of the 2018 season, the teams and the number of times they have held the #1 weekly ranking are shown below. The number of times a team has been ranked #1 in the postseason poll (the national champion) is shown in parentheses.

There has been only one tie for the leading vote-getter in a weekly poll. In 2015, Southern Oregon was tied with Marian (IN) in the preseason poll.

In 1999, the results of a postseason poll, if one was conducted, are not known. Therefore, an additional poll has been presumed, and the #1 postseason ranking has been credited to the postseason tournament champion, the Northwestern Oklahoma State Rangers.

References