Oklahoma State’s Position in the Preseason AP Poll is a Rarity in Recent Years

Photo: Bruce Waterfield, OSU athletics

The preseason AP top 25 poll came out on Monday, and Oklahoma State was ranked in the top 15. Surprisingly, I realized as I looked back on previous preseason polls that this is more of an anomaly over the last decade than you might expect.

OSU has been ranked in the top 15 in the preseason AP poll five times under Mike Gundy but just once in the last six years. Here’s a look.

Interestingly, every time this has happened OSU has risen in the rankings at least four spots, which will happen again this season (see below). Even though its preseason ranking hasn’t always popped, this is the 11th year out of the last 13 OSU has been ranked as high as No. 15 at any point during the season and the 12th out of 13 it has been ranked inside the top 20 at some point. The only year it failed to crack the top 20? Last year.

Here’s a look at OSU’s highest ranking in every year of the Gundy era.

That’s unbelievable consistency for nearly a decade and a half. Also, one of my favorite stats is that the highest ranking for the 2014 team was higher than 2012 and 2019 ever were. That is … bizarre.

One other note here: This might imply that OSU is consistently underrated, but all the data we have on that suggests otherwise, that it is actually mildly overrated, at least within the Big 12 annually.

Finally, here’s a look at OSU’s postseason AP ranking in every Gundy year.

Even more bizarre (?) is that OSU only has one top-10 finish under Gundy. If you would have asked me that three weeks ago, I would have lost money on it.

The interesting part here about 2020 is that OSU is almost immediately going to jump into the top 10. As long as the ACC, Big 12 and SEC have a season and OSU beats Tulsa, it will be ranked somewhere around No. 11 or No. 10 because four teams ahead of the Pokes (Wisconsin, Oregon, Ohio State and Penn State) will not be having a season. AP voters were instructed to vote those teams into their preseason rankings but drop them after that.

If I would have told you on January 1 that OSU would be undefeated going into conference play and inside the top 10 in the polls, you probably would have believed me, but now it’s almost certainly going to happen.

Also, Oklahoma State’s chances of finishing in the top 10 for just the second time under Mike Gundy are much improved over previous years given that teams from both the Big Ten and Pac-12 won’t be included after Week 1. There’s one massive asterisk on this entire season, of course, and we may never be able to properly compare 2020 to 2017 or 2013 or any other year. But OSU is sitting pretty in a spot it’s rarely found itself over the last six years and a lot of runway out ahead of it in the weeks and months to come.