The Pickled Pig's BBQ Team Power Rankings - Top 25

Welcome to our BBQ Team Power Rankings. We compete in several KCBS sanctioned barbecue contests each year and are constantly learning tips, tricks, and techniques from fellow competitors. We thought it might be helpful to keep track of which teams are hot so we know who to spy on in future contests. We also thought it might be fun to see where we stack up among the BBQ Elite. These Power Rankings are for informational and entertainment purposes only.

Scoring

Currently, The Pickled Pig only factors KCBS sanctioned contest results into the rankings. The scoring methodology is simple. We only look at the Top 10 finishes in each contest for Overall, Chicken, Ribs, Pork, and Brisket categories. So in order to appear on our ranking list, a team must finish in the Top 10 in at least one of those five categories in at least one contest this year. For each category, we award 10 points for a 1st place finish, 9 points for a 2nd place finish, 8 points for 3rd, etc. The scoring is cumulative for the dates selected. Obviously a team that competes in more contests has more opportunity to earn points in our scoring. And, our scoring model does not take contest size into account. Those teams who compete in smaller contests are more likely to earn points than those who compete in larger contests. As contests are completed, the results will be updated.

Don't like our scoring methodology? No problem. We've created a web application that allows you to define your own scoring criteria and parameters. Check out The Pickled Pig's Do It Yourself BBQ Rankings Generator here.

Power Rankings Results Date Range

You can enter a different contest date range to limit or expand the contests included in the results. Note: Our database only contains records dating back to January 1, 2007.

19" Model

Data Limitations

We want these Power Rankings to be as accurate as possible. However, there are many known limitations or problems with the data we analyze. We've done our best to clean it up and fill in the gaps but have reached a point where we need someone to point out remaining problems to us so we can correct them.

Missing Data

We were unable to find some of the KCBS contest results to include in our tabulation. For a complete list of the contest we know we are missing all results data, click here. There are also a few contests where we only obtained partial results for one or more categories. If you have any missing results or know where we can find them please let us know by emailing us.

Typographical Problems

The biggest problem we've encountered in this project is the absolute lack of standardization of team names in the contest results. The cumulative scores are based on the team names and this poses a big problem. Since KCBS does not issue team numbers, we're often left to interpret teams the best that we can. Here's a list of common problems we've encountered and how we addressed them:

• Special Characters and Case - To help avoid confusion, we are reporting all team names in upper case only. In addition, we've eliminated all "s and all 's. And, we've replaced all &s with "AND" and all @s with "AT". For the time being, we've left all -s in place. Besides being difficult to code around, the elimination of special characters simplifies the editing process.
• Variation of Names - This can be a number used instead of text (i.e., "4" instead of "Four") or missing words (i.e., the word "BBQ" is often left off). To correct for this, we manually scan the list and try to standardize on the most often reported variation.
• Mispelled Names - We're not sure who is responsible for the spelling of team names (i.e., the team, the contest organizer, the KCBS rep, or KCBS) but there are considerable spelling variations from contest to contest. To address this we manually scan the list of teams and try our best to correct for mispelled words when we believe they are not intentionally mispelled.
• Duplicate Team Names - Duplicate or nearly duplicate team names are the most difficult problems to address. We literally have nothing but the team name (as reported in the results) to go by. We gave weight to the number of contests the teams scored in and the geographical region of the country to address these issues. For the high scoring and well known teams that competed often, we assumed any near duplicates were the same team. For contest results from the same geographical area, we made the same assumption. If a team scored once on the West coast and once on the East coast, we kept them as separate entities. For anything in between the extremes, we used our best judgment. Please let us know about any errors by emailing us and we will fix them accordingly.