College Football's Most Overrated

By way of the Detroit News, by way of ESPN (though I didn't notice this on the CFB
portal), college football's ten most overrated teams:

1. Florida State (-63)
2. Tennessee (-58)
3. Washington (-42)
4. Miami, Fla. (-35)
T5. Ohio State (-34)
T5. Nebraska (-34)
7. Florida (-33.5)
8. Michigan (-25)
9. Texas (-24)
10. Clemson (-22)

These rankings were made by taking the difference of teams' preseason rankings against their final rankings over the past 10 seasons and adding them all up to determine which programs had been the "most overrated" and "most underrated." The number (n) in parenthesis behind each team name above is that difference compounded over the past ten seasons.

Looking at the flipside of the results, we get college football's ten most underrated teams:

1. Washington State (+51)
2. Boise State (+48)
3. Oregon (+32.5)
4. Arkansas (+26)
5. Wisconsin (+23)
6. Louisville (+20)
7. Texas Christian (+18)
T8. Boston College (+17)
T8. Iowa (+17)
T8. Maryland (+17)

Any surprises here?

I'm not sure. To me overrated is about facing high expectations year after year, a byproduct of sustained success, indicating not really being overrated. Whereas with being underrated you have the advantage of flying under the radar early and moving up into the soft underbelly of the top 25 as a few surprise teams do every year. It is imminently easier, to start low and surprisingly rise when you don't face said expectations and real obstacles (like the SEC compared to Conference USA) or risk being overrated at all.

If Hawaii slips from a pre-season ranking of 25 out of the poll, they lose 1 spot in this ranking system and suffer no such ignominy as being called 'overrated.'

On the flipside, a team that has to start high (Michigan) and risk a more dangerous and unlikely path to win it all (which if you're starting high is the only way to match the commensurate rise enjoyed by the underrated) has a much tougher time and more to lose for failing. A drop from a pre-season #3 to a pre-season #8 somehow makes them look a bad, overrated team?

Maybe I'm being too liberal in my view of the term 'overrated.' Scientifically speaking this ranking is right if a team underachieves from where they're projected to finish, but that methodology assumes a lot of science that the college football ranking system just doesn't have.

Finally, given a liberal interpretation of 'overrated,' all college football fans see it as a bad thing, that overrated teams are bad teams. But the real truth, the truth that is continually betrayed by pre-season rankings, that the overrated list includes some of the most storied-names in college football, doesn't back up this claim.

9 of the 10 teams on the 'overrated list' have won National Championships recently. So who's overrated now? QED.