🧨 TNT College Football Rankings
A live-updating college football rankings site for you and your friends.
Everyone builds their own Top 25 ballot by dragging team helmets into place,
and all ballots are averaged into the combined TNT Ranking — recalculated
live the moment anyone changes their ballot.
Features
- Easy helmet ranking — all 136 Division I FBS teams get an SVG helmet in
their school colors with the school + mascot name underneath. Tap a helmet
to add it to the next open spot, then drag or use the ▲▼ buttons to
reorder, and ✕ to remove — no dragging required if you don't want to.
Drop zones highlight while you drag. Filter the pool by any FBS conference
(SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, ACC, American, C-USA, MAC, Mountain West, Pac-12,
Sun Belt, Independents) or search by name.
- A poll for every week — Preseason, Weeks 1–16, and Bowls/Final. Each
user submits one ballot per week, and there's a TNT Ranking for every week.
A "Copy previous week" button pre-fills your ballot so you only have to move
what changed.
- Weeks close on time — a week's ballot locks the moment the next week's
games kick off, so nobody rewrites history after seeing how it turned out.
Closed weeks show as a plain final list with a 🔒 in the week picker; the
open week shows its deadline. The server refuses late writes, so the
deadline is real rather than a suggestion.
- TNT Ranking (AP-style scoring) — a #1 vote is worth 25 points, #25 is
worth 1. Points are summed across all ballots; first-place votes are shown
in parentheses, and teams outside the top 25 land in "Also receiving votes."
Only a finished Top 25 counts — a ballot with spots still open doesn't
affect the ranking (or the playoff seeding) until every slot is filled, so
a team's total never depends on how many people are still mid-ballot.
- What changed this week — every week's ranking is topped by New to the
poll, Biggest riser and Biggest faller, measured against the most
recent earlier week anybody voted in (so a week nobody ranked is stepped
over rather than wiping out the comparison). Risers and fallers are teams
ranked in both weeks — a team that fell out of the top 25 has no new rank
to measure the fall against, so it shows up by its absence rather than as a
faller. Ties are all shown: two teams both up six spots are both the biggest
riser.
- AP / Coaches poll tab — the real national polls next to ours. Flip
between the AP Top 25 and the US LBM Coaches Poll for the week you're
viewing; each team shows its points, first-place votes, and how far off the
TNT Ranking is on that team (
TNT #3 ▲8 = we have them eight spots higher).
The 2026 preseason Coaches Poll is loaded; the AP preseason poll isn't out
until Aug 17, so it says so until you add it. These polls are typed in by
hand, not scraped — add a week by dropping an entry into
public/polls.js (the format is documented at the top of the file).
- Playoff bracket — a live 12-team bracket built off the current TNT
Ranking using the 2026 CFP selection rules: automatic bids to the four
Power-4 champions (ACC, Big 12, Big Ten, SEC) plus the single highest-ranked
Group of Six team (American, C-USA, MAC, Mountain West, Pac-12, Sun Belt),
then at-large bids fill the rest, everyone seeded straight by rank. Top four
seeds get first-round byes; seeds 5–12 play in the first round. Since there
are no game results, a conference's "champion" is proxied by its
highest-ranked team. Updates the instant the ranking changes.
- Preseason predictions (locked until kickoff) — a separate tab, split into
three sub-tabs, where each person makes their calls before the season starts:
(1) the two teams they think meet in each of the ten FBS conference
championship games plus the winner, (2) a full 12-team playoff prediction —
seed your own field, then tap a team in each game to advance them all the way
to a national champion (bye slots, reseeding and downstream games update
automatically), and (3) the Heisman, picked off the preseason odds board
(~50 players, longest shots last; the board lives in
public/heisman.js and
is hand-entered, so it's easy to update). Your picks stay
completely private — nobody can see anyone else's until they all lock the
moment the first game kicks off (Aug 29, 2026). Until then a live countdown
shows how long is left and who has already locked in (names only, never their
picks); once the clock hits zero everyone's predictions are revealed side by
side.
- Built for phones — every tab is laid out for a phone screen, not just
shrunk down: the tab strip scrolls sideways, the team pool goes three helmets
across, both brackets stack round-by-round instead of scrolling sideways, and
nothing runs off the edge (checked down to 360px wide).
- Light / dark mode — a toggle in the top bar; your choice is remembered.
- Live updates — when a friend saves their ballot, your TNT Ranking
updates on its own within a few seconds, no refresh needed. Your own saves
show up instantly.
- No passwords — it's for friends. Pick your name once and your ballots
save under it automatically (autosave on every change).
- Opens to the right week — no setup step. The site lands you on the week
you were last viewing, or on the latest week anyone has ranked if it's your
first visit. Switch weeks anytime with the dropdown.
Running it
npm install
npm start
Then open http://localhost:3000. Set PORT to change the port.
Locally, everything is stored in data/store.json (created automatically), so
back that file up if you care about your poll history.
Deploying to Vercel
The site is built to run on Vercel: public/ is served as static files and
each file in api/ becomes a serverless function. Pushing to the connected
branch deploys it.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
