BLACKSBURG, VA – NOVEMBER 22: Miami Hurricanes offensive line Anez Cooper (73) attempts to block Virginia Tech Hokies safety Isaiah Cash (18) while Hurricanes quarterback Carson Beck (11) surveys the field for an open receiver during a college football game between the Miami Hurricanes and the Virginia Tech Hokies on November 22, 2025, at Lane Stadium in Blacksburg, VA. (Photo by Lee Coleman/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
Entering this past weekend, four Atlantic Coast Conference football programs had one league loss, while two had two losses. The Southeastern Conference had one undefeated team, three with one loss and three with two losses. Other leagues had several teams still in the hunt to play for a conference championship in early December, too.
The best way to figure out the various scenarios? It isn’t to go to major sports websites, which don’t have tools to figure out the projected standings. Instead, diehard fans and reporters log on to a non-descript website with an odd domain name (bball.notnothing.net) run by Josh Prins, an Iowa State alum who works as a health care actuary and barely ekes out a profit from his longtime side project that began by figuring out the seeds for the 2003 Big 12 women’s basketball tournament. And he couldn’t be happier.
On the website, Prins has the current standings of the 10 Football Bowl Subdivision conferences, as well as the remaining league games. Visitors can click on who they think will win each of those games, press a button titled “Calculate Standings” and see how the teams will be ordered in the conference standings. Last year, Prins added a FAQ section for all of the conferences where he links their tiebreaker procedures, which can often be complicated, and details how he determines the seeds, which can be difficult for people to figure out when multiple teams have the same records.
In all of the FBS conferences, except for the two-team Pac-12, the top two teams advance to the league title game on Dec. 5 or Dec. 6, so Prins’ website is essential for understanding who may be playing. Those games in the major conferences help determine seeding and qualification for the College Football Playoff, too, adding to their importance.
On the second-to-last regular season Saturday a year ago, Prins’ website had more than 190,000 page views, breaking a record. Between 8 pm and midnight, as the games were going on, the website crashed several times.
“The conference title game tiebreaker site I use is down, and I’m trying not to freak out,” veteran On3 college football analyst Andy Staples wrote on X that night.
“It started smoking and sparking,” replied Sickos Committee, a popular X account with more than 157,000 followers.
Said Prins: “It was just absolutely insane.”
Since that night, Prins upgraded his server to handle the traffic surges, and it has been working better than ever even as more people find out about the website. Although the 115,000 page views this past Saturday were less than on the same Saturday a year ago, Prins said the overall traffic is up this football season, as conference title game spots in most leagues are still up for grabs.
Prins grew up as a University of Iowa fan before moving in middle school to Ames, Iowa, near Iowa State’s campus, so he changed allegiances. Midway through his freshman year at Iowa State, he began attending Iowa State’s women’s basketball games with his parents and girlfriend, who is now his wife. They went to nearly every women’s game and some men’s basketball and football games until Prins graduated in 2001 with an electrical engineering degree.
In 2003, Prins was active on a message board for Big 12 women’s basketball and noticed there were conversations about the potential seeding for the league tournament. At the time, he had experience in computer programming and had obtained a domain name (notnothing.net) to host his wife’s and brother’s blogs.
“Not a whole lot of thought went into notnothing.net as a name,” Prins said. “(His wife) wanted to put a blog up on our own server because she had been using one of the various blogging websites, and we just said we’ll host it ourselves. One evening, we were checking GoDaddy.com to see what was available, and we landed on notnothing.net.”
Soon, Prins developed a program to chart out the various Big 12 women’s seeding scenarios and tiebreakers and hosted it on his domain at bball.notnothing.net. In 2006, he added Big 12 men’s basketball. In 2014, he developed the same for Big Ten men’s and women’s basketball. Over the next six years, Prins kept adding to his website. He had all of the Division 1 men’s and women’s conferences by 2020.
“I try not to favor men’s basketball over women’s basketball on my site in any way,” Prins said. “Whenever I’d add a conference, I’d be sure to add both men’s and women’s at the same time.”
In basketball, most teams make their conference tournaments, and the winners each receive an automatic berth to the NCAA tournament. As such, all of the seeds and the league tournaments are important, not just the top two seeds like in football. While Prins has had all of the basketball conference scenarios on his website for five years, and many for even longer, he still has to tweak the formulas because leagues sometimes add and subtract teams and change their tournament structure and tiebreaker procedures.
In 2020, Prins began adding football conferences, something he said likely happened because he had time on his hand during the COVID-19 pandemic. By last year, he had all of the FBS conferences loaded and noticed traffic spiked. In fact, Prins draws more interest in football in November heading into the conference tournaments and the CFP than he does with basketball in February entering the league and NCAA tournaments.
For football, traffic peaks on Saturdays and Sundays during the season, particularly on the weekend or two before the regular season ends. For basketball, the traffic is more consistent, but the highest trafficked day generated about 100,000 page views, nearly half of the biggest football day. The SEC draws the most traffic for football, while the Big Ten has the most page views in basketball.
While Prins himself has been under the radar for the past 20 years even as his website’s popularity grows, he encourages feedback, even posting on his website to “please tweet or email me any issues.” People often take him up on the offer.
“I get a fair number of questions and not uncommonly people will say, ‘Hey, this isn’t working right,’” Prins said. “Usually I’ll explain why it is actually working right, but sometimes they are correct and it’s not working right. I definitely appreciate all of those (messages) because even the ones where someone says it’s not working right but it was, it makes me at least think through things again and make sure that I am confident in the way that it’s working.”
Since graduating college, Prins has always had a full-time job in competitive, high-paying fields, first as an electrical engineer and software developer and for the past dozen years as an actuary at Milliman, a leading actuarial and consulting firm. For most of that time, he has also kept updating and perfecting his website even though he has never had advertising on it or charged a subscription.
A few years ago, some readers asked Prins how they could show their appreciation financially, so he added a small link on the bottom of the website to his Venmo address. He said he receives a bit more than enough to offset the $150 in annual server costs it takes to operate the website.
“I make a little money,” Prins said. “It pays for a few pizzas.”