The most underrated (and overrated) NCAA College Football teams

Welcome to The Eisen Estimation! I am Jon Eisen, and this is a space for my ramblings, thoughts, comments, and complaints about all things sports. In particular, I will follow one simple rule for all posts: All analysis must be objective, even if the underlying opinions are not. I will use statistical evidence to answer questions and develop insight into all things sports.

Our first topic: NCAA College Football polls. First, my opinion of the polls is quite low. They start with an arbitrary opinion favoring only the most celebrity-like programs, and then use filtering algorithms to correlate their previous rankings with the next week, until they arrive at a conclusions that is mostly based on the original (and arbitrary) preseason rankings! My focus this week is on the absurdity of the preseason rankings.

So, whats the underlying question: Who do the polls favor in the preseason rankings? And, are these programs "celebrity-like"?

To answer this question, I found the change in rankings of any team from the preaseason to the final for the AP poll. (Thank you http://preseason.stassen.com/over-under/). This data covers the last 21 years. It takes the final rankings minus the preseason rankings (unranked = 26th), then sums that value over all 21 years.

First, the initial results...
The most underrated teams in the past 21 years:


Boise State 75
Oregon 72
Washington State 70
Utah 64


Those four make up the top echelon of underrated teams, and they are all teams that have been good in the past 21 years, but not (preseason) ranked so highly.

Now the most overrated teams:


Oklahoma 74
Notre Dame 76
Southern Cal 77
Michigan 78


These are all very good teams, but each it seems has been overrated to a significant degree. Hows the distribution look for all the teams?

On the right, we see the top 4 underrated teams, and on the left, we see many overrated teams. This implies there are more consistently overrated teams than consistently underrated. As teams get better consistently, the voters get smart, and stop underrating them. BUT, it seems that they don't stop overrating teams. Consider this year's preseason poll. Of the top 10 most overrated teams of the past 21 years, 3 are in the preseason Top 10, and 7 are in the Top 25. I would bet that more than half of these finish below their preseason position. On the other side, of the top 10 most underrated teams, 3 are in the top 10, and 4 are in the top 25.

We can definitely see that the overrated teams are the more celebrity-like programs: USC, Michigan, and Notre Dame definitely fall into that category. Interestingly, Alabama (preseason #1) is one of the more underrated teams.

We have uncovered evidence that supports the claim: The AP poll consistently overrates celebrity programs, and underrates smaller programs. But, more questions were revealed than answered. For instance, there are some interesting outliers, what are the trends? USC has been good for a long time, could they just be overrated slightly for each year? What is the standard deviation? Could Michigan be simply affected by one bad (really really bad) year after being chosen for a top 5 preseason ranking? Do voters ever learn their lesson?

These answers and more... next time!