BLOG POST: Using Elo ranking to create a college cricket Top 25
Updated: Jun 11
The 2025-26 academic year was another bumper year for college cricket where teams, for the second consecutive year, had the opportunity to compete for national championships across two governing bodies: the Collegiate Cricket League (CCL) and the National College Cricket Association (NCCA). Additionally, college cricket teams participated in an enhanced regional structure that brought together institutions in geographic clusters, including the South, Mid-Atlantic, Northeast, Midwest, and Pacific. I had the opportunity to witness in-person some national championship action at Broward County Stadium in Florida earlier this year. Because of this I may even be considered the “first travelling fan” of the CCL!
As I have previously opined, cricket’s path to the apex of U.S. college sport is a tricky one. Yet, the vastness of competitive opportunities suggests that cricket is becoming an increasingly legitimate college sport. But how else could cricket align itself with big-time college sports?
In U.S. college sports, Top 25 ranking systems are used to identify and compare the nation's highest-performing teams, providing fans, media, and stakeholders with a simplified measure of competitive success throughout the season. These rankings also help generate publicity, increase fan engagement, and shape perceptions of team quality, particularly in sports where postseason selection and national championship discussions are influenced by comparative evaluations of team performance (Smith, 2009). I thought to myself, what would a Top 25 ranking of the best teams look like for college cricket?
What proceeded was a multi-step process. To start, I created a master list of competitive intercollegiate matches between June 1, 2025 and May 31, 2026. This search began by collating formal matches played under the auspices of governing bodies (e.g., CCL, NCCA). To widen this search to include other matches – such as scrimmages, bi-lateral series, etc. – the social media accounts of active college cricket teams were analyzed.
There are some context-specific limitations worthy of mention with this approach. For instance, the master list included all publicly disclosed competitive matches between college teams. This means the rankings are based on a combination of different game formats from tape ball to leather ball, from 10-over to 20-over games, and so on. In addition to variation in format, the games included within the master list were likely subject to different governing rules – especially in terms of player eligibility. Nevertheless, a total of 272 competitive matches were logged involving 66 college teams. This competition network is mapped below.
Once this list was finalized, I then needed a way to make sense of how teams performed. Elo rankings are a quantitative rating system originally developed by Elo (1978) to estimate the relative strength of competitors based on match outcomes, with ratings serving as predictors of future performance. Ratings are updated after each contest by comparing the actual result to the expected result; competitors gain more points for outperforming expectations and lose more points when they underperform (Elo, 1978; McGinnis, 2025). Although first designed for chess, Elo-based systems are now widely used in sports and other competitive settings because they provide a dynamic and statistically grounded method for ranking teams and individuals (ChessRef, 2026; McGinnis, 2025).
Although Elo rankings provide a transparent and dynamic method for evaluating team performance, they may be slow to reflect rapid changes in team quality, rely heavily on win-loss outcomes, and often fail to account for contextual factors such as strength of schedule, injuries, and roster turnover unless additional model adjustments are made (Elo, 1978; Hvattum & Arntzen, 2010). Furthermore, the system reduces team strength to a single rating value, potentially oversimplifying the complexity and variability inherent in competitive sport environments (Glickman, 1999).
Limitations aside, as a first bite at the apple I decided to implement an Elo-based ranking system whereby all teams began with a baseline rating of 1200. Following each match (entered chronologically), ratings were recalculated using a K-factor of 32, providing a balance between ranking stability and responsiveness to changes in team performance. The outcome of which is The CricAdemic Group’s (very unofficial) Collegiate Cricket Top 25 Rankings…
This could be a cool project to continue and improve. Perhaps even introducing weekly updates, regional rankings, or format-specific rankings in time. Maybe even introducing a way to incorporate expert opinion into rankings through ranking committees and/or coach’s polls. And while the Elo method is far from perfect, my hope is the idea of introducing a national ranking for college cricket teams – to further embed cricket into the U.S. college sport landscape – has provided some talking points and food for thought.
References
ChessRef. (2026). How the Elo rating system works in chess. https://www.chessref.com/learn/elo-rating-system/
Elo, A. E. (1978). The rating of chessplayers, past and present. Arco Publishing.
Glickman, M. E. (1999). Parameter estimation in large dynamic paired comparison experiments. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series C (Applied Statistics), 48(3), 377–394. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9876.00159
Hvattum, L. M. & Arntzen, H. (2010). Using Elo ratings for match result prediction in association football. International Journal of Forecasting, 26(3), 460-470. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijforecast.2009.10.002
McGinnis, W. (2025). Elo rating system. Elote Documentation. https://elote.mcginniscommawill.com/rating_systems/elo.html
Smith, R. A. (2009). Sports and freedom: The rise of big-time college athletics. Oxford University Press.
