The 2019 NAIA football rankings reports the poll results conducted during the 2019 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 was determined by compiling points for each vote. A team received 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) were disregarded. To obtain the final tally, each team's ranking was 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 were 17 voting panelists, and one team is a unanimous choice for the highest ranking, then that team would receive 25 points * 15 ballots (disregard 2 ballots) + 17 points (one for each ballot cast) = 392 points.

Teams that received only one point in the ballot were not considered “receiving votes.”

Once the regular season was completed, the NAIA conducted a playoff to determine the year's national champion. A final poll was taken after completion of the series of playoff games, collectively referred to as the 2019 NAIA Football National Championship.

Poll release dates

The NAIA released a preseason edition of the rankings on August 5, 2019. A complete schedule of poll release dates will be:^[2]

Week by week poll

* preseason rankings include prior season won-loss records

The postseason tournament

A 16-team tournament was contested to determine the winner of the 2019 NAIA Football National Championship. Teams were 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 received an automatic bid into the tourney field.

After the automatic bids were granted, any open positions in the field were filled with at-large invitations. These at-large entries were granted to the highest ranked teams who were not conference champions.

In 2019, there were 12 NAIA conferences (or divisions within large conferences) who had champions that were part of the selection process for the automatic invitations. The 12 eligible conferences for the 2019 season were:

Since all 12 conference champions finished in the top 20 positions in the final poll, they each received an automatic place in the tournament. Therefore, a total of four at-large invitations were granted to play in the 2019 tournament. Based on the Week 10 (final regular season) Coaches' Poll, the following teams (12 champions and 4 at-large teams) made up the 2019 playoff field:

After the tournament participants were determined, the top 8 seeds were granted first round home games. Opponents were generally determined based on the oft-used tournament protocol that pairs highest seeds with lowest seeds: #1 vs. the lowest seeded entry (usually #16), #2 vs. the second-lowest seeded entry (usually #15), #3 vs. the third-lowest seeded entry (usually #14), etc. This alignment was then tweaked, for geographic and travel considerations, by the tournament selection officials to determine the announced first-round pairings.

The first round tournament match-ups, finalized and announced on Sunday, November 17^[15] , were:

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 final poll of the 2019 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