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by Jeff Fuller (@jjfuller72)
Are College Football Preseason Polls Accurate and Still Worthwhile?
Part 1 of this series analyzed how many times each team has started in the AP Preseason poll compared to how often they have finished there. Over the last 50 years, USC (-14 times in the final ranks compared to preseason), Notre Dame (-11), Oklahoma, and Florida have been the most overrated teams by this method while BYU (+8) and Boston College (+7) were the most underrated. Over the last 5 years, Texas A&M (-4), Wisconsin (-4), USC (-3) and Utah (-3) have been the most overrated and BYU SMU, South Carolina, and Liberty all tied at +2 as the most underrated.
The limitations/value of that type of binary result/analysis were discussed in Part 1 and here I present two sets of data that look at how well each team performed each year compared to their preseason AP rank.
Statsen has an interesting data set highlighting the total poll placement difference between preseason and final AP rankings over the last 34 (+1) years, from 1989 to 2023 (their website has the 2024 under-/over-rated data, but since it hasn’t been added to the larger data-set yet, I added it manually):
By this analysis, not a single current Big XII team was in the top 24 most overrated teams since 1989 which included many of “the usual suspects:”
- 8 SEC teams (Texas, OU, LSU, TAMU, Florida, UT, UGA, Auburn)
- 8 Big Ten teams (USC, Michigan, Nebraska, UCLA, UW, Ohio St, Wisc, Penn St)
- 7 ACC Teams (Florida St, Miami, Clemson, UNC, Syracuse, Cal, VaTech)
- Notre Dame
WVU was the #25 most overrated team, and the only Big XII team to have a net overrated figure, but it was only -6.5. All 15 other Big XII teams had a positive figure, meaning a net UNDER-rated team.
Clemson has underperformed their pre-season rank for six straight years and USC has done so 8 of the last 11. Texas has only exceeded their pre-season rank in two of the last 17 years. Nebraska is the 8th most overrated program since 1989, but hasn’t started or finished ranked for 8 straight years.
On the flipside, the 25 most underrated programs in the AP preseason poll since 1989 are as follows:
TEN of the Big XII’s 16 teams are in the 22 most underrated including all of the 5 most underrated P4 schools of BYU, TCU, Cincy, K-St, and Utah (and by quite a margin, with all 5 between 60-68, then a gap to Northwestern at 53 & then an even bigger gap to BC at 44.5.) Only 3 SEC teams and 5 Big Ten teams were in the top 25 most underrated.
Before recently stumbling onto Stassen’s 35-year data set, I had compiled a similar set of data from the College Poll Archive site, but going back 50 years, to 1975. Implicit in the Stassen’s method is that every non-ranked team was tied for 26th nationally, which doesn’t seem to punish under-performers nor reward over-performers enough in my opinion.
For this analysis, I assumed that every team who finished unranked tied for 30th (this was changed to tied for 27th from 1975-88 since only 20 teams were ranked in that time period.) While also clearly not a perfect method, we can confidently assume that the average unranked team was statistically closer to being ranked 30th than 26th in any given year. Also included in this data set is the actual number of years appearing in the preseason and final AP poll, the percent of years meeting/exceeding expectations, and the total number of weeks appearing in the AP’s weekly polls over 50 and 25 years.
The discussion of these results will be fleshed out in Part 3 of this series
