Reader Emails: OSU, Clemson Among Most Underrated Teams of the Decade

A take: Chick-fil-A is overrated. That doesn’t mean it’s bad. It just means it’s not as good as people think it is. Whole Foods is also overrated. Please sign up for PFB+ for more of my spicy takes. Not really, but do still sign up for PFB+ if you’re interested.

All that to say, being overrated doesn’t mean you’re bad just like being underrated doesn’t mean you’re good. Kansas football is underrated every year because they cannot possibly be rated any lower than they already are. 

Friend of the blog, @RookOSU, did some heroic work recently on overrated/underrated college football teams using a very simplistic (but enlightening) method where he looked at preseason ranking and postseason ranking for every team for the 2010s.

Unsurprisingly, OSU came out glowing and Texas (big shocker here!) did not.

I’ll let him have the floor …

While sitting at home pondering if UT was the most overrated program year in and year out since 2010, I decided I’d put my Saturday night lameness and over-stat-sportsing to use.

I wanted a way to measure it. So since 2010 I tracked every preseason AP poll and then compared to the postseason AP Poll. The results were fun.

UT is not the most overrated by using this method, but they were close. Adam Lunt and @CarsonCunningham’s boys, sadly for them, were.

Here are the rules :

1. ‘Points’ are awarded as one point for being ranked No. 25, two points for being ranked No. 24 and so on. I multiplied this times the number of years you have been ranked.

2. Variance is defined as Postseason points minus Preseason points. If your number is negative, you were “Overrated” to start the season. If you had a positive number of points you were “Underrated” to start the year.

3. Yes, this obviously has the flaw of using the AP postseason logic to criticize AP preseason logic. But…just…don’t worry about that.

4. P5 conferences will typically tend to be more ‘overrated’ due to not many people ranking Group of 5’s in preseason polls.

5. Voters (as we all know) default towards helmets only in the preseason, as is evident by 22 overall fewer teams being represented in preseason polls than post.

Here is the data (click photo to enlarge).

Underrated Teams

Overrated Teams

Conference Look