Last Year's Fantasy Predictions

Last year I gathered some the biggest fantasy football nerds I knew of and asked them a very simple question: Who will be 2010's sleepers and who will be 2010's busts. Well 2010 is over and before we make this years predictions it is time to see how they did.

Adam Tate

Last year- Adam predicted that Andre Johnson would not be the #1 receiver due to the rough schedule that the Texans predicted. Adam also predicted that Eddie Royal would bounce back from a disappointing sophmore year.

Analysis - Adam was partially correct. Andre Johnson was not the #1 receiver and in fact finished 8th among WRs, trailing Lloyd, Bowe, White, Jennings, Johnson, Wallace, and Nicks. However, Eddie Royal did not bounce back. He finished the season with a mere 75 points and barely caught half of the passes thrown to him.

Joe Kenny

Last year - Joe had a whole list of players on his bust list including: Bulger, Delhomme, Hightower, Hester, Forte, and Desean Jackson. He also thought that Chad Henne would be 2010's sleeper.

Analysis: Mixed bag. Bulger and Delhomme were awful but no one really expected them to do anything. Hightower and Hester were disapointments. However, Forte finished with 199 points and Jackson was a touchdown machine once he teamed up with Michael Vick. Joe was way off with with his Henne prediction. Henne finished as the 25th QB behind Shaun Hill and John Kitna.

Kyle Kenny

Last year - Kyle predicted that Lesean McCoy would be a bust because Mike Bell would steal many of McCoy's carries. Kyle also predicted that Matt Ryan would become an "upper tier" QB due to his continued development and all the offensive weapons at his disposal.

Analysis - McCoy finished 7th. The only RBs projected to finish ahead of him and met those projections were Chris Johnson and Adrian Peterson. As for Matt Ryan... Ryan did improve but still finished 8th among QBs.

Mark Mills

Last year - Mark Mills predicted that Shonne Green was not worth the #12 pick and that Kevin Kolb would become the man in Philly.

Analysis - I wish I would have listened to Mark last year. Shonne Green was indeed a bust, scoring only 86 points. LaDanian Tomlinson, who was supposed to be the backup scored 149. Kevin Kolb didn't become the man in Philly but that was only because Michael Vick was the comeback player of the century.

Matt Christensen

Last year - Matt predicted that Stephen Jackson would not be a top RB because the Rams have no other offensive weapons and teams will stack the box against him. Matt's sleeper was Mathew Stafford, preemptively because Matt likes his name.

Analysis - Matt was mostly right on the Stephen Jackson call. Jackson finished as the 12 RB and dealt with a nagging hip injury all year long. Unfortunately Stafford was injured almost all season long and finished with a mere 49 points. 1 point less than Jimmy Clausen.

Recap: Finding a bona fide sleeper is tough. Not one of us nailed our sleeper projections and some of us were way off base. As a group we fared much better at identifying which players were over-rated. Mark's prediction that Shonne Green would be a bust was probably the best prediction made by the group. Now that your confidence in us is completely and utterly destroyed, make sure to our next article which will give predictions for the 2011 season.

Overrated! - Clap Clap - Clap Clap Clap

(Texas is objectively the most over-rated team over the last 5 years)

Every year the preseason polls come out and every year we look back with 20 / 20 hindsight and notice that the voters missed something. Case in point, last year's National Champion Auburn was ranked 23rd in the preseason polls and Stanford, who finished 4th was not even ranked. Meanwhile Teaxas started the season ranked #6 and finished with a losing record.

This year's poll (http://espn.go.com/college-football/rankings) will be no different. Some team will vastly outperform expectations (Air Force) and another will flounder under the pressure (Texas A&M.)

This conundrum often sparks the debate whether we should rely on preseason polls at all. On the one hand, preseason polls are consistently incorrect and play too big of a factor of determining later polls. But on the other hand, the polls allow fans to get excited for big non-conference games which typically take place in the beginning of the season.

Today's article doesn't take a stance on this controversial issue. Rather it objectively looks at what teams are consistently over-rated and under-rated by the preseason AP voters.

(Andrew Luck lead his Cardinals from being unranked to 4th in the nation.)

Method to the Madness

I compared the AP preseason poll with the AP post season poll. If a team finished two spots ahead of where it was projected, it was awarded 2 points. If it finished two spots behind where it was projected it had 2 points deducted. No team could gain or lose more than 10 points in any given year.

There are some inherent flaws in this system. First, it cannot account for the fact that the poll voters are still biased at the end of the season. Second, it punishes those teams who are highly ranked at the beginning of the season and rewards those who are just outside the top 25.

Observations

* I did not foresee Cincinnati being the most under-rated team over the last 5 years.

* The former Mountain West did really well with BYU, TCU, and Utah all being ranked as the top 10 under-rated teams.

*The voters either vastly under-rate BYU over vastly over-rate BYU.

*After a team outperforms its expectations in one year, the voters tend to over-estimate that teams abilities the following year.

*The SEC only had 1 team (Arkansas) in the top 10 under-rated teams, but also only had 1 team (Georgia) in the top ten over-rated teams.

* The ACC appears to be the most overrated conference with 3 of its teams finishing in the top 10 most over-rated teams.

*Oregon has consistently outperformed its expectations. Posting a positive number for the last 4 years running.