Intro
March Madness is underway, so we at RT thought it would be a great time to dust off our Top Sports Movies list, a compendium of the best-reviewed films from the wide world of cinematic sports.

It's a wide-ranging list, one that includes everything from hardball heroes (The Pride of the Yankees, Field of Dreams) to gridiron greats (Remember the Titans Friday Night Lights). In addition, everything from surfing (Riding Giants) to golf (Caddyshack) to hockey (Slap Shot) to the sport of kings (Seabiscuit) is represented.

Honestly, we were shocked at the low rankings of some of the sentimental favorites (including Hoosiers, Rudy, Rocky, and The Natural), but ultimately those rankings are all based on the review stats (and not our own personal feelings). It's kind of like a good relief pitcher: he may have a lower ERA than a starter, but he'll also get a lot fewer wins.

Whatever your favorite athletic pursuit, you'll find something here to make you fire up the DVD player. Without further ado, check out RT's Top Sports Movies and enjoy the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat, and everything in between.

How It Works

• Each critic from our discrete list gets one vote, all weighted equally.
• A movie must have 20 or more rated reviews to be considered.
• Reviews without ratings are not counted toward the results.
• Because reviews are continually added, manually and otherwise, we have a cutoff date at which new reviews are not counted. The current cut off date is 8/7/2008.
• We use a weighted formula (Bayesian) to account for variation in the number of reviews per movie. The winners are determined by the rankings, designated as the "adjusted score," after applying said formula:

  (r ÷ (r+m)) × t + (m ÷ (r+m)) × a, with "r" representing the number of rated reviews, "m" the minimum number of reviews needed for a movie to qualify, "t" the Tomatometer score, and "a" the average Tomatometer of all the qualifying movies

• In the event of a tie, the following, in order, will be used to break the tie: the user tomatometer percent, the total number of cream of the crop reviews, and the number of fresh cream of the crop reviews.