Gridiron Globetrotters: How America’s College Football Rankings Became the World’s Favorite Arbitrary Hierarchy
From the Shard to the Sahara—everywhere the Wi-Fi reaches—strangers ask the same question: “Who’s No. 1 in college football?” It is, on the surface, a charmingly parochial query, like asking a Mongolian yak herder about the pecking order of East Anglian lawn-bowls clubs. Yet the answer is parsed in trading rooms from Frankfurt to Singapore,…