A huge part of societal discourse in this country revolves around talking smack about sports. You have probably heard your drunk friends, crazy uncles and the guy in the cubicle next to you at work espousing theories about bias in the preseason college rankings and favoritism towards certain teams. I've heard dozens of people claim that "Notre Dame is always overranked in the preseason because the sportswriters love them" or "Oklahoma is always underranked because their graduates can't write so they are denied representation in the sports press corps." Though I believe that Oklahoma does suffer unfair discrimination due to the illiterate state of their state (just threw in a homonym there to throw any Sooners who might be trying to read this for a loop), in general I think these rumors of bias are unfounded. Or, I should say, I used to think so. I recently completed an analysis of ten years of data that does seem to reveal biases.

As you all know, Notre Dame-haters (of which there used to be many more before Notre Dame started sucking) are always crying that the Irish are overranked. Turns out that's B.S. Over the last ten years, the Irish have actually been underranked in the preseason. Only in 1996 did they significantly underperform vis a vis (that's French for you Sooners) the preseason expectations.

So who is actually overranked? I hate to admit that my Longhorns are near the top of the list of consistently overranked teams. I can understand that though. Who doesn't love the Horns and wish the best for them? It's easy to be optimistic about such a great team, state and people. But unfortunately the Longhorns do have a tendency to disappoint. Soon they'll be mentioned in the same breath with the Cubs and Red Sox. Maybe we, too, can have a Bill Buckner or a Steve Bartman. Maybe it will be one of our many high school football stars who cross the border each year to pretend to be Oklahomans for a little while. In their youthful naïveté (French again, Sooners) they sometimes think the stain of playing for OU will be worth it to start on a Big 12 team after Texas has turned them down. "And besides," they tell themselves, "when Texas plays OU, it's just a bunch of Texans on both sides of the ball anyway. So maybe no one will notice."

Actually, the most overranked team of all is the Michigan Wolverines. I haven't figured out yet why everyone loves the 'Rines (or is it Wolvies?). Maybe there is some special significance of the yellow arrow on their helmets that Midwesterners grasp that is beyond me. In any event, someone out there just can't get enough of the 'Rines.

Another consistently overranked team is Florida State. This one baffles me. Florida State has kicked a full metric ton of butt over the last ten years - two national championships and five top three finishes. But the preseason hypesters expected more?! Did they expect them to win first place twice a few years? Or just to not lose a single game?

The most underrated team over the last ten years? Oregon. That's right. The pundits were shocked - just shocked! - when Oregon did better than expected ... 5 times in 7 consecutive seasons (1994-2001). You'd think the pundits would eventually notice a trend. In every single season in which the Ducks finished ranked in the last ten years, they finished much higher than predicted.

Also, as a sweetener, I also figured out which college football magazines have had the most accurate preseason rankings. Here are the rankings on that:

Those are just a few of the highlights, but feel free to look the data over for yourself. You can download the full Excel spreadsheet here.