Forget last year’s national champion Alabama, Texas, USC, Florida or any of the other big schools: the Farm is where it’s at. If you’re a football-fanatic freshman, you made the right choice to come here.

Now that I have your attention, I’d better explain myself. There are really a huge number meanings for “football,” with the biggest of these including American (what most of you just call football), Australian (Aussie) rules, Gaelic, rugby (union and league) and, of course, association (aka soccer or, to us foreigners, football). Most aren’t widely played at American universities, and I am not going to attempt to research the comparative strengths of schools based on all of them, so let’s just pick American, rugby union and soccer. Almost exclusively, American football is only played by men, whereas the other two are played by both men and women at the college level. Though rugby union is not generally an NCAA sport, it is still widely played at the club level, and Big Game was even a rugby match between 1904 and 1914; surely that’s reason enough to include it.

Stanford’s final (top-25) season rankings in these from last year were: football (21, BCS), men’s soccer (14) and women’s soccer (2, NSCAA), men’s rugby (unranked) and women’s rugby (2, RUGBYMag.com).

An aggregate “football” ranking can be worked out by simply assigning points to the school for each sport (25 points for No. 1 down to zero for unranked). And yes, you guessed it, Stanford comes in first with 65 points. UCLA, absent from the BCS rankings, is narrowly second with 64, ahead of North Carolina (59), while Cal sits at 11th. None of the top 10 BCS schools is in the top 10 for “combined football.” Perhaps quite predictably, the highest-ranked schools are those represented in at least three or four of these sports.

Stanford’s position last year owes a lot to both the much-improved performance of its men’s teams (football and soccer) and the high achieving women’s teams. Interestingly, the women alone would have sealed seventh place on this list.

Those with eyes only for the gridiron will probably find holes to pick in my hastily drawn-up statistics, but it is no mean feat that the Cardinal comes out on top. These are all very different sports and even to be ranked in the top 25 requires a committed and professional approach by both coaches and players. That Stanford is one of the few schools to be represented at this level across four out of five of these further underlines, if that was ever needed, its Directors’ Cup dominance and 34-year NCAA title streak.

Stanford’s hopes of retaining this title in the coming year rest on the women repeating, or even bettering, the successes of recent seasons, and on whether the men’s teams can continue to improve.

Unfortunately for Cardinal men’s rugby, the best 32 programs across the nation have left the existing setup to create their own Collegiate Premier League. With these changes in place, it may now be effectively impossible for Stanford to rise to the same level as, and be ranked alongside, the top 25. Even excluding this one sport though, the Cardinal still hosts some very strong football programs within its 8,000 acres.

Preseason polls (including last season’s final ranking for women’s rugby, because a more recent poll was unavailable) dropped the Cardinal to fourth, though notably the football program was then unranked. Following the most recent available rankings, Stanford (55) is down one place to fifth after football’s return to the top 25 (now at No. 19 on both the AP Top 25 and USA Today Poll), the positive effect of which was essentially cancelled out by the men’s soccer team dropping off the list.

North Carolina and BYU now sit tied with 59 points at the top of this combined football table, and Penn State is one point adrift in third. Stanford’s cross-Bay rivals, the Golden Bears, are just one place and two points behind the Card, in sixth.

However good Stanford football (that’s American football now) turns out to be this year, no one is ever going to give it a shot at a national championship; however, it could climb higher up in the top 25, and the Rose Bowl is not out of the question. Meanwhile, the two women’s teams could well bring home their own NCAA titles, and some will view anything but as a disappointment.

The ability of men’s soccer to rebound from a losing start will probably be the clincher, though: if it were still at its preseason ranking of No. 13, the Card would be clear of the pack by a massive nine points.

But the season is barely a few games old and already the preseason rankings count for nothing. There will be enough highs and lows, shocks and surprises between now and its end to keep any sports fan happy.

So get ready for some football.

Tom Taylor just wanted to prove to himself that he could use Excel 2010 to draw up these statistics. School him on spreadsheets at [email protected].