With college golf well underway in the 2025-26 season, more than half of the fall slate is in the books. And yet, the NCAA golf rankings still aren’t out.
That changes Wednesday, when the first edition of Mark Broadie’s rankings will release. It marks the third year since Broadie’s rankings have been the official college golf ranking, replacing Golfstat, which started providing rankings in the 1989 for the women and 1992 for the men.
And since that time, the first official, meaning NCAA-recognized rankings, have released Oct. 15. There may have been a point in time when they came out a week or two sooner, but Oct. 15 is one circled on the calendars for those following college golf.
Donnie Wagner, who used to be on the NCAA committee for golf, said the date was selected by former Golfstat founder Mark Laesch. Since then, it has stuck. But why?
In an age where college golf has gone through plenty of change, many coaches have clamored for rankings to come out sooner, even if it’s by a week or two. When Broadie’s rankings release Wednesday for every division, some teams will have completed their fall schedules. Others are playing their final events this week. So, why is there a wait until now for them to come out?
“The NCAA told me the rankings must start every season with a clean slate, meaning nothing from last season can go into this season’s rankings,” Broadie said. “So you’re really starting from zero. And starting from zero means one event isn’t enough, and the reason for that is you can’t do a ranking if teams aren’t somehow connected.”
Broadie used a baseball example of the American League playing only AL teams and the National League playing only NL teams. You could rank both leagues separately, but it wouldn’t make sense to rank them against each other since they didn’t play.
Now take college golf, where in the first week of the season there are (for sake of argument) 10 tournaments with 15 or so teams in each field. Because there is no crossover yet, it would be nearly impossible to rank the teams against one another following each tournament’s completion.
Essentially, as more tournaments are completed and more data is compiled, a more accurate ranking is established.
“Could it be earlier than October 15? Yes,” Broadie said. “Could it be a lot earlier? Probably not, unless you want to make some additional assumptions about how teams in different regions or teams who haven’t played – not only haven’t played each other but there’s no connections – from one team to another.
“You definitely don’t have to directly play all teams; you can’t ever do that. But you can’t have five teams or 10 teams that just play in a group, and those five or 10 teams don’t play anybody else, they’re kind of off on their own, and you can’t rank them, you can’t weave them together with the other teams, until there’s some kind of crossover or some connectivity.”
Broadie does not choose when the ranking is published. That’s up to the NCAA, which takes feedback from both the Golf Coaches Association of America and the Women’s Golf Coaches Association on whether changes need to be made.
As for changes in this year’s rankings, Broadie said the biggest one is a slight change that won’t affect every division or gender. Broadie said there will be an additional guardrail that prevents points being too large for runaway winners.
“The reason it’s really a tweak is that if you had these in place for last year, they would affect very few events, and in those very few events, they would only affect the winner,” Broadie said, “The reason it’s very few events is you’re just kind of looking at outlier performances.”
Broadie said the change would’ve only affected a handful of tournaments from last season. At the Division I level, the guardrail is in place for the women in 2025-26 but not the men. Broadie said the changes came at suggestion from the coaches or the NCAA before they were voted on.
“That’s an example where we want to make the rankings reflect the wishes of the coaches,” Broadie said. “My job is to make this as mathematically sound and rigorous and unbiased and fair system, but within that framework there are some choices, some subjectivity in terms of how you build a ranking to reflect their wishes. And this was a case where men said, ‘No, we like it the way it was last year. Let’s keep it.’ And the women said let’s put in this tweak.”
