Welcome to American college football!

After watching Stanford University’s gridiron team annihilate Rice University in Sydney on Saturday, perhaps you have a curiosity about the rest of the American football scene.

The ELO-following football column is here to oblige!

Throughout the season, I’ll be providing you updates on the ten conferences and 130 teams of the top-division of US collegiate football (referred to here in the US as the “FBS”, or the “Football Bowl Subdivision”).

Here’s a quick rundown of those ten conferences, their general geographic locations, their hierarchy within the financial and performance levels of the schools’ teams, and a general consensus regarding the prospects for those teams within the conferences and (for the best teams) the prospects for a possible national championship.

The South-Eastern Conference (or SEC) is one of the leagues in the “Power Five”, designating the five conferences with the most resources financially, which dovetails into what they can do on and off the field.

The leading team (and national champion four of the last eight years) is from the University of Alabama, and they should be the national favourites again this year.

Their main challengers will be from their intrastate rivals, Auburn (Alabama), along with Louisiana State University (LSU), the University of Florida and the University of Georgia. All of these schools reside in the southeastern portion of the US (hence the name!), where football tends to be taken a bit more seriously than elsewhere.

Other schools include Mississippi State, Mississippi, Texas A&M, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, Vanderbilt (in Tennessee), Arkansas, and South Carolina.

The Atlantic Coast Conference (or ACC) shares some of that passion and territory, notably the population-rich state of Florida. Its major competitors include flag-favourite Florida State University (bitter rivals of the University of Florida – don’t mix them up!), and the defending national champions from Clemson University in the nearby state of South Carolina.

Their game has decided the league champion for the last several years, and may very well do so again in 2017.

Also competitive this year will be the University of Miami (Florida), Virginia Tech, and the University of Louisville (in Kentucky). Other schools in the ACC include Syracuse (in upstate New York), Boston College (Massachusetts), North Carolina and North Carolina State, Duke University (just eight miles from the U of North Carolina), Wake Forest (also in North Carolina), Pittsburgh (in Pennsylvania), Virginia (where the Charlottesville protests were last week), and Georgia Tech.

The Big Ten is a northern-Midwestern conference with fourteen teams, despite the name. (It’s a long story, mostly having to do with expansion and money-seeking).

The two major teams in the Big Ten have traditionally been the Ohio State University and the University of Michigan, whose rivalry game at the end of the season, like Clemson and Florida State’s, almost always decides the conference champ. Last year, however, Pennsylvania State University, or “Penn State”, won the title.

Ohio State is also one of the national favourites this year, having won the championship last in 2014. Also in play besides those three schools this year are the Universities of Wisconsin, of Nebraska, of Iowa and of Minnesota.

Other teams include Michigan State University, a traditional power; Indiana, Purdue University (also in Indiana), Rutgers (the state university of New Jersey), Maryland, Illinois, and Northwestern University (also in Illinois – at the time it was christened, Illinois was in the northwest of the United States!).

The southern portion of the Midwest is covered by the Big Twelve, which has ten teams. We Americans can’t count, apparently.

Oklahoma and Oklahoma State are the two favourites this season, with Texas, Texas Christian University (“TCU”), West Virginia, and Kansas State in their rear view mirrors.

Baylor University’s program is recovering from scandal and may or may not be competitive, and Texas Tech, Iowa State, and the University of Kansas will pull up the rear.

The western portion of the US is blanketed by the Pacific-12 conference, or “Pac 12”, which oddly has exactly 12 teams in it.

Some of you saw Stanford’s team perform Sunday and the reasons they are one of the favourites in the league this season along with the University of Washington in Seattle, the University of Southern California (aka “USC”), and maybe Washington State, the University of Oregon, and UCLA.

The University of California has 20 campuses, the two largest being UC-Los Angeles and UC-Berkeley, both members of the Pac-12. UC-Berkeley is often just called “Cal” or “California”.

The rest of the conference: Utah, Colorado, Arizona, Arizona State, and Oregon State.

Those five conferences plus Notre Dame, a Catholic university in Indiana which competes independently in football, make up the “Power Five”, from which the national championship contenders will undoubtedly emerge.

Their sheer commercial drawing power gives them a huge competitive advantage over the other five conferences, which are nicknamed the “Group Of Five” and are guaranteed just one spot in the six major bowl games, and although they traditionally are very competitive in those games, the segregation remains and the divide is in fact growing.

Right now, the strongest of the Group of Five conferences is the AAC, or the American Athletic Conference. The favourite there, the University of South Florida, is ranked in the top 20 in every media pre-season poll (though my ELO-FF handicap system has them tied for 22nd to start the year), and if they go through the season undefeated (and they have a very easy schedule compared to the rest of the top schools), they could be under consideration for a spot in the national finals.

No Group of Five team has yet been included, although there were times when Boise State (in Idaho, my state of residence) and Utah and TCU (before they were absorbed into top conferences) were also under consideration after an undefeated regular season.

The teams seeking to knock USF off the top of the AAC ladder include the University of Houston (in Texas), the Naval Academy (based in Maryland), Temple University (in Philadelphia), and the U of Memphis (in Tennessee).

If you know your American geography better than many Americans do, you’ll see this conference is rather spread out, as many of these lower tier leagues have to be to gather quality programs.

The other universities in the AAC include Cincinnati, Connecticut, East Carolina (which is actually in North Carolina; East Carolina is not a state), Central Florida, Tulane (in New Orleans), Tulsa (Oklahoma), and Southern Methodist University (in Dallas, Texas).

The Mountain West is probably the next strongest conference, covering the portion of the western US that the Pac-12 misses. Boise State and San Diego State (in southern California) are the two strongest teams of late, with challenges this year from Colorado State and Wyoming. The

Air Force Academy competes out of Colorado as well, and the other schools include New Mexico, Nevada-Reno, Nevada-Las Vegas, Utah State, Fresno State and San Jose State (both in central California), and the University of Hawaii, who came to Australia last year and lost to Cal 51-31.

Being on an island in the middle of the Pacific, their travel costs are astronomical – for example, they open the season by travelling to the University of Massachusetts, a 20,000-mile round trip, to win 38-35.

The Mid-American Conference, or MAC, has some strong teams as well: Western Michigan was the Group of Five representative last year in the major bowl games and fared well before losing a close game to Wisconsin.

The favourite here this year, though, is the University of Toledo (Ohio), with WMU, Northern Illinois, Ohio University and the U of Miami-Ohio (there are two major American universities in cities named Miami. I know. Confusing.).

Also in the MAC are Central Michigan, Eastern Michigan, Buffalo (New York), Akron and Kent State (both in Ohio), Bowling Green (Kentucky), and Ball State (Indiana).

Conference-USA (or C-USA) is the home of Rice University, recent visitors to Sydney’s Allianz Stadium with Stanford last Sunday (for some reason, I screwed up in my pre-game article and said Rice was in Dallas. Rice is actually getting flooded by Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Texas).

The favourites in the C-USA, however, is Western Kentucky, followed by Louisiana Tech, Southern Mississippi, Middle Tennessee, and Old Dominion University (from Virginia).

Marshall University (West Virginia) is a traditional power that was down last year, and the other teams in the conference include Texas-San Antonia, Texas-El Paso, North Texas, Florida International, Florida Atlantic, Charlotte (North Carolina), and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, which just reinstated their team after controversially cancelling football two years ago.

Finally, there’s the Sun Belt Conference, which includes last year’s co-champions Appalachian State (West Virginia) and Arkansas State. Both are favourites again this season, along with Troy University (Alabama), Georgia Southern University, and the University of Idaho, which despite its current success is planning on moving down one level of college football next season for economic and scheduling reasons.

Look at a map and you’ll realize why Idaho and New Mexico State don’t fit with the rest of this conference.

Also in the Sun Belt are Coastal Carolina (which just moved UP to top-division football), Georgia State, South Alabama, Texas State, Louisiana-Monroe and Louisiana-Lafayette (sometimes just called “Louisiana”).

Ten schools are within a day’s drive of each other – but New Mexico State is 614 miles from the closest of those schools (Texas State), and Idaho is another 1456 miles north of NMSU! No wonder the Sun Belt wanted to push the two schools out the door.

Idaho is planning to become part of a lower-division (“FCS”) league called the Big Sky, with other teams from Montana, Washington, North Dakota, California, and yes, even Idaho. Economics drives college sports, perhaps more than any other sport in the world.

New Mexico State will try to make it as an independent after this season. There are three other university teams which compete independent of any league for differing reasons.

Brigham Young University (“BYU”), the flagship school for the LDS religion, uses their independence to play a wider range of opponents than they could have in a conference. The US Military Academy (“Army West Point”) has “always” been independent, and that tradition is as important to them as it is to Notre Dame. And the University of Massachusetts literally got kicked out of their last conference and is still searching for a new league to call home.

I hope that with your sports appetite whetted, we can keep you abreast of the goings-on abroad in the world of American collegiate football. You won’t regret it!