National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I-A football championship features more than 100 top college football programs in the United States. Competitions for the national title are surrounded by enormous fan interest and receive extensive media coverage. Many of the games are attended by tens of thousands of spectators and are followed by millions through the media. As a result, success of a team on the football field brings increased student applications and substantial financial profits to the institution it represents. Due to a large number of teams and absence of a playoff system in college football, the best team cannot be determined in a traditional way. For many years, the national champion or two contenders for the title have been determined based on certain rankings. However, with more than 100 teams competing and up to 14 games played by each team in a season, the problem of ranking becomes a nontrivial matter. Until recently, the rankings were decided purely based on collective opinion of press writers and coaches. A major controversy happened when the primary polls selected different national champions. In 1998, the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) was introduced as a more trustworthy way of determining who is who in college football. The major components of the current BCS selection scheme are coach/sport writer polls and computer-based rankings. The BCS system has managed to produce an undisputed champion each year since its implementation until 2004, when the two major polls produced different champions again. The importance of fair ranking system is not diminished even with the planned introduction of two-round playoff system since the new formula will still use rankings to determine the four playoff teams. Some of the computer-based rankings included in the BCS scheme use unclear methodologies and have been criticized for their poor performance. On the other hand, some of the proven analytic decision making tools used to rank alternatives elsewhere remain unemployed by college football ranking schemes. This presentation reviews the computer-based ranking methodologies currently used by BCS and proposes a novel college football ranking procedure based on the powerful techniques of Analytic Hierarchy Process. In this approach, the scores of all games played during the season are summarized in a matrix of pairwise comparisons which is analyzed to derive the fair, unbiased ranking. The results produced by the algorithm on data from the past five seasons validate the approach.Keyword(s): assessment, athletics/sports, research