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 - Changed For 2009!

Beginning January 1, 2009 we are tracking all results from contests. We will no longer limit our Power Rankings to Top 10 finishes. As a result of this expanded capability, we've significantly altered the Power Rankings scoring model. For a complete explanation and examples of how we calculate the Power Rankings, click here.

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.

The Pickled Pig's Power Rankings are cumulative for the calendar year. They include all contests completed between January 1 and December 31. The Power Rankings reset each January and the fun begins again.

Data Limitations

We want these Power Rankings to be as accurate as possible. However, there are many known limitations and problems with the data we analyze. Please keep in mind that our data is not provided, certified, endorsed, or approved by the KCBS or any other sanctioning body. We've done our best to clean it up and fill in the gaps but we need someone to point out any remaining problems to us so we can correct them.

Missing Data

Occassionally, we are unable to find some of the KCBS contest results to include in our tabulation. For a complete list of the contests we know we are missing, click here. 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 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.