Preseason Most Underrated/Overrated NCAAF Teams since 1989

[TomCollins]

http://preseason.stassen.com/over-under/all-teams.html

Not surprising, Notre Dame is the most overrated team.
Washington St. is the most underrated.

Fairly interesting table. However, my problem with it is that it gives an inherent advantage to non-powerhouse football schools who aren't usually ranked in the top 25. Basically, a bad year for these teams, and they don't fall, but a good year they go way up the list. The only way for this to be accurate is if it uses a publication that ranks every team 1-120whatever at both the beginning and end of the season.

With that said, I believe this STILL underrates how overrated Notre Dame usually is.

[SossMan]

This table is terrible. They count 'unrated' as 26th in the polls.

[imported_CaseClosed326]

And USC is second most over-rated...This is kinda stupid.

[TomCollins]

Why is it stupid? They were very overrated preseason in the late 90s.

[ QUOTE ]
And USC is second most over-rated...This is kinda stupid.

[/ QUOTE ]

1989 is when this chart starts....just because USC is good now doesn't mean they weren't overrated until 3 years ago.

And i agree that you would need the preseason rankings from 1-117 for this to be effective. You can't just lump all unranked teams as 26th but an interesting chart anyways.

[ThaSaltCracka]

this might be the most retarded chart ever.

[SammyKid11]

I like the idea of this chart, but for it to be useful it needs to incoporate 1-117 (or however many D-1's there are now). It fails, for instance, to note how severely underrated someone like this season's TCU team was at the beginning of the season.

TCU was, by most preseason power rankings, somewhere right in the middle of D-1's pack -- about 60 in most that I saw. They are currently #15 and will move up farther if they win their bowl game. That's underrating them by close to FIFTY spots, yet this list doesn't account for that.

It also, as another poster mentioned, does not account for how far a team can fall during a given season, either. This list makes it hard to account for HUGE discrepancies between a team's expectations and eventual results.

[ThaSaltCracka]

[ QUOTE ]
but for it to be useful it needs to incoporate 1-117

[/ QUOTE ] It would still be stupid, even if it did this. This type of analysis is silly because it will always favor medium to small programs, while hurting larger programs. I personally think college football rankings are absurd anyways. If a team is ranked 20 overall in the preseason, and they finish 18, does that mean they were really that underrated? I don't think so. The same can be said for a 15th ranked team preseason, that finishs 18th.

Another reason this chart is silly. 15 years is such a small sample, anything can happen then. Programs could rise and fall during that time, rapidly even. ND, UW, Nebraska, Penn State are all good examples.

[imported_CaseClosed326]

I think TSC summed it up well. Pre-season ranking as stupid way to judge anything. It just favors small schools and punishs large ones.