I was watching College basketball (from Australia), and I was wondering what the number next to the team was.
I guessed it was the seeding, but I had a look at the other teams win-loss record, and the one with a better record was unseeded, and the one with a worse record was 11th or something.
How does the system work? :dubious:
In America, there are two weekly polls which rank the top 25 teams. The polls are the Associated Press poll, which is voted on by sportswriters, and the ESPN/USA Today coaches’ poll, which is voted on by a group of coaches randomly selected before the season begins.
Top 25 voting often has less to do with records than it does with the program itself. A team like the Murray State Racers have less chance of being a top 25 team than the Kentucky Wildcats, even if the Racers are undefeated. The strength of schedule is also a serious factor, as beating a bunch of cupcakes like Southeast West Virginia Technical College and Convenience Store is not as impressive as playing teams like Kansas, Duke and North Carolina.
As Brianjedi stated, there are two separate polls. Usually they are fairly close to each other, but it is not at all uncommon for a team to be rated third in one poll and fourth in the other, for example.
Generally ESPN and USA Today (and their affiliates, such as ABC Television) will use the Coaches Poll, since they are sponsors of it. Most other news and TV outlets will use the AP poll.
Another point, the number you see isn’t at all related to seeding. In fact, when the selection committee meets at the end of the year to place teams in the NCAA Tournament, their position in the 2 polls really has very little to do with what seed they eventually end up with.
In reality, the polls are a decent way to identify good teams, but a great way to give fans of various schools something to argue about.
But presumably ESPN and AP both don’t rate Australia college basketball…
Was the OP watching American college basketball in Australia or Australian college basketball?
I would guess American basketball in Australia. College sport in Australia is almost non-existent and certainly not televised.
College basketball also has a computerized system called the RPI (Ratings Power Index), which weighs heavily in the seeding and geographic placement of teams in the NCAA tournament.
Here’s one example of it:
http://www.sportsline.com/collegebasketball/polls/rpi/index1
The NCAA has its own official one which isn’t released to the public, although most people have been able to reverse engineer it in a sense.
Watching College basketball from America.
Australian’s don’t have sporting teams from our Unversity’s (colleges) 
In the regular season, the numbers will just refer to the team’s rankings in the AP or ESPN polls.
During the NCAA basketball tournament, teams will be seeded 1-16 in the four regions and CBS (who televises all games) will use those numbers to identify the two teams playing.