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.