The FCS is Division I’s second tier with its own playoff system

Frustrations with the BCS system led to the creation of the College Football Playoff

Controversial rankings, disputed championship matchups, and calls for a fairer path to the title pushed college football to replace the BCS with a four-team playoff in 2014.

The SEC is a powerhouse conference with 16 teams and a rich Southern football tradition

Formed in 1933 after splitting from the Southern Conference, the Southeastern Conference began with 13 schools. It has since grown to 16 members, defining college football with numerous national championships and rabid regional rivalries.

What is the NCAA First Four?

March Madness's play-in games—known as the First Four—whittle down the field from 68 to 64. This resource from the NCAA breaks down the history of the First Four, which began in 2011. The gears were in motion long before that, though, thanks to the addition of the Mountain West Conference to Division I, which necessitated more than 64 teams for the March Madness field.

Five years after UMBC, Fairleigh Dickinson defeated Purdue to become the second-ever 16-seed to beat a 1 seed.

Five years after UMBC shocked Virginia, FDU pulled off an even more improbable upset. Ranked last out of all 68 tournament teams and a 23.5-point underdog, the Knights stunned Big Ten champion Purdue 63-58.

The United States is one of only around two dozen countries with a fully federal system of government, in which power is divided between national and state governments.

The Super Bowl is the National Football League’s championship game

Played annually in early February between the league’s two conference champions, the game was created as part of the 1966 merger between the American Football League and the National Football League. It has become the most-watched sporting event in the US each year.

Federal systems are a minority among the United Nations' 193 members

Of the United Nations' 193 member countries, roughly two dozen use a federal system, dividing power constitutionally between national and subnational governments. This group includes the United States, India, Canada, Germany, and more. The video walks through examples of how these states operate.

Ranking the highest college football coach salaries

See the pay received by notable college football coaches in the US. Topping the list is Georgia’s Kirby Smart, with a total pay of over $13M. Smart is followed by Clemson’s Dabo Swinney, Texas’ Steve Sarkisian, and USC’s Lincoln Riley. Scroll through the list of 134 names with the lowest displayed salary of $376,000.

The Shutdown Fullcast tells college football’s weirdest and wildest stories

The Shutdown Fullcast is a college football podcast covering everything from bizarre games and strange traditions to tangents about mascots and university town food.

The tournament in 2026 will have 48 teams

After 24 years of having a 32-team tournament, the FIFA World Cup will get an upgrade in 2026, expanding the field to make it the largest World Cup ever.

The federal government offers billions in student aid each year in the form of scholarships, grants, loans, and more

The very first—and necessary—step is to fill out a federal application to get your information into the system. Known as the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, this key form must be completed by Oct. 1 for the following academic year.

What is a dependent care FSA?

Dependent care flexible spending accounts allow people who care for someone incapable of self-care to save pretax dollars to support the dependent person. However, there are stipulations. For instance, anyone seeking a dependent care FSA must be able to claim the individual as a dependent on their income taxes. Read more about dependent care FSAs here.

Inside one credit union’s big NFL bet

Herndon, Virginia-based Northwest Federal Credit Union is working to bring credit unions into the spotlight. The relatively small institution just made a big splash when it struck an $8M-per-year naming rights deal with the Washington Commanders. Northwest is now the official credit union partner for the team and has turned FedEx Field into Northwest Stadium. Banking nerds and sports fans alike are paying close attention. Read this article to learn more.

Formula 1 cars are the world's fastest regulated road-course racing automobiles

F1 is the highest international level of open-wheel racing, where the wheels are not covered by the car’s body, differing significantly from NASCAR, which have covered wheels.

Learn how the NFL Draft works

Teams select players in a set order over seven rounds, with the weakest teams from the prior season picking first. Picks can be traded, and teams that lose free agents may receive additional compensatory picks.

FIDE has governed international chess since 1924

The Fédération Internationale des Échecs was founded in Paris in 1924 to unify global chess rules and competitions. Today, it oversees world championships, regulates ratings, and serves as the official governing body for millions of players worldwide.

Mutual fund share classes are rankings of different types of services for investors

The more services an investor has, the more expensive of a class they’re in. While investors are all technically investing in the same securities with the same investment strategy, different classes dictate extra services and attention given to investors, which can seriously impact an investor’s returns.

UC Santa Cruz's nontraditional mascot was selected by its students

After becoming an NCAA Division III school, UC Santa Cruz ditched its informal mascot, the banana slug, for a sea lion. Students protested and eventually held a straw vote to reinstate the old name, which they saw as an antidote to the hypercompetitive nature of college athletics.

Only 156 players secure a PGA Tour Card each year

Automatic eligibility is granted to past PGA Championship winners, while newcomers must win a PGA-approved tournament, rank in the top 70 of the FedEx Cup standings, or finish in the top 30 of the Korn Ferry Tour finals.

See how a good VantageScore and a good FICO score can differ

While VantageScores and FICO scores both offer credit scores between 300 and 850 and consider the same core factors, they weigh those factors differently, and specific numbers can have different meanings depending on the type of score.

Not all companies with bank-sounding names are actually FDIC-insured banks

When purchasing a certificate of deposit, it's important to know if you are purchasing a “deposit” product issued by an FDIC-insured bank.

The most common types of bankruptcy filings are Chapter 7, Chapter 11, and Chapter 13

However, there are actually six types in practice today. These less-common options can be lifelines for foreign businesses operating in the US, local governments, and farms and fisheries.

Fantasy has dozens of subgenres

“Fantasy” itself is a rather broad way of characterizing fiction. The genre encompasses many subgenres, including epic (like JRR Tolkein’s “Lord of the Rings”), dark (like Neil Gaiman’s “Coraline”), or even superhero (like your favorite Marvel or DC comics).

Learn why electrical substations are needed to provide safe electricity with minimal energy loss

These typically fenced-off facilities with steel boxes or cylinders topped with cone-like caps house circuit breakers, fuses, and switches that can isolate sections of the grid to prevent electrical failures from spreading. Substations use transformers to modify electrical voltage and are customized to the generation, transmission, and distribution networks they interconnect.

Film festivals are where independent projects find studios

Film festivals are incubators for the movie industry, providing smaller films and their producers with opportunities to screen in front of live audiences, as well as potential investors who may offer wider distribution.

Fungi can cause disease, but they’re also our planet’s key decomposers

Fungi are their own taxonomic kingdom separate from flora and fauna, acting as the key decomposers and nutrient recyclers for our planet. Watch this video to understand the diverse types of fungi and the stages of the fungal life cycle. This video illustrates how fungi species may spread, eat nematode worms, damage nearby plants, and much more.

How fusion—which releases energy when two lighter atoms combine to form a heavier atom—differs from fission

Play the role of a student in a game where you try to navigate college and remain debt-free, selecting different income levels, high school experience, race, ethnicity, and more.

Dozens of S&P 500 stocks, including Coca-Cola and Walmart—known as the dividend aristocrats—have increased dividends every year for 25 years

Hedge funds, the private investment firms that trade a wide swath of financial assets, make money by imposing steep fees on investors and from the fund's investment performance.

The American Society of Civil Engineers' infrastructure report card gave the US a C in 2025, its highest grade since the project launched in 1998.

The 1987 Nintendo video game 'Stadium Events' isn't known for being particularly fun, but its scarcity has made it a highly sought-after item that has sold for up to $35K at auction.

Ebola is a filovirus, meaning it resembles a thread under a microscope, though it sometimes twists and can resemble a bowl of spaghetti.

Up to a million Girl Scouts sell about 200 million cookie boxes every spring, generating $800 million, largely because refusing a child is frowned upon

The syncytiotrophoblast is the outer layer of the placenta and the largest human cell, spanning an area about twice that of a king-sized bedsheet.

Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps is independent of Iran's regular army and is one of the most powerful and influential military-political organizations in the Middle East.

When caught in the mouths of cardinal fish, seed shrimp release glowing, bioluminescent chemicals, which alert predators of the cardinal fish, prompting the shrimp's ejection.

Brandi Chastain, the star of the 1999 US victory over China in the 1999 Women's World Cup, was a last-second choice to take the penalty kick that sealed the victory.

Lesser-known phobias include turophobia, or the fear of cheese, and nomophobia, the fear of being without your cell phone.

Some coin denominations have ridges etched on their sides, partly to prevent counterfeiting, in a practice called 'reeding.'

US intelligence allegedly pursued more than 600 schemes to assassinate Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro.

See how Budweiser's famous Clydesdales spend their days at Warm Springs Ranch, where roughly 70 to 80 of the beer brand's giant horses can be found at any given time.

The use of fungi to detoxify land and water—a process known as mycoremediation—has been used to clean up natural resources affected by the 2025 California wildfires.

Corals are themselves not coral reefs—the term refers to the tiny marine invertebrates that build the rigid reef.

Most of the observable universe's volume consists of voids and supervoids—enormous regions of space with little to no galaxies, stars, or light.

Browse a detailed visual analysis of over 200,000 similes—comparisons that often use 'like' or 'as'—from popular fiction to see how frequently writers the same idiomatic expressions.

Before humans, the Soviet Union and the United States sent animals—including apes, dogs, and cats—to space during the Space Race.

Waves off the coast of Nazaré, Portugal, can reach over 100 feet and are caused by the area's deep underwater canyon geography

Chaos theory—informally known as the butterfly effect—is the reason why weather forecasts are presented with probabilities rather than certainties.

When you complete a CAPTCHA on a website to prove you are human, you may be unknowingly training algorithms for self-driving cars, whose systems require training data to help identify crosswalks, bicycles, and other outdoor objects.