Cool site... You would think KCBS would provide a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly standings to date as the season progresses rather than just wait until the year is over. I would not think that would require a lot of resources since they have all the data anyway.
From the site on the calculations used:
http://nationalbbqrankings.com/article/4/Themathbehindtherankings
08/08/07
The math behind the rankings.
System Description This week’s article is going to explain how the National BBQ Rankings calculates the rankings each week. Hopefully this will help everyone better understand how the rankings work. The National BBQ Rankings use a rolling 104-week calendar and diminishes. For Example Teams can score points by finishing in the top ten overall with the points going as follows.
RankPoints
1st 15 points
2nd 12 points
3rd 9 points
4th 7 points
5th 6 points
6th 5 points
7th 4 points
8th 3 points
9th 2 points
10th 1 point
The period multiplier starts at 2 and drops .1538 for each period; results older than 104 weeks receive a multiplier of 0. So for example if a team wins a non-bonus contest this weekend that contest is worth 30 points to their overall score. They received 15 points for finishing first at the contest and then the period multiplier of 2.0 multiplies that score. But remember that each week we don’t just add the points earned that week, but that we totally recalculate every contest’s value since points are decaying every week.
It is worth noting that points dropped off the end of the 104-week calendar aren’t really worth that much so teams are not losing tons of points from week to week. The period multiplier for the 13th period is .1544 so a contest win that falls into that period is only worth about 2.3 points towards the overall score. I hope that this sheds a little light on how we calculate each teams score, but if you have any questions about the rankings please feel free to
contact us. We’d be very happy to answer any questions.