College football Week 1 thread: Chasin’ That Neon Deion Rainbow

Duke QB's a big boy.

 

Just wondering how many of the "big-name coaches" did not have their teams ready for opening day. LSU, Clemson, Florida, Nebraska, TCU ....

 

With all the realignment going on - I'm sure many non-cons will need to be re-scheduled - if not all together dropped. Which will be good news for the FCS and low G5 schools. They will get to keep the payouts and then find new games where they will be paid in 2023 dollars, not the 2018 dollars when the previous games were agreed to. And I'm sure many P5 schools will pay any price for "guaranteed" wins.

 

But enough about KenPom, which too many college basketball people seem to think is infallible. His model definitely includes previous season performance to try to determine a baseline for the next season.

In the transfer portal age? You can throw that shit out of the window. Each season is its own entity.

 

In the same vein, history has no bearing on the present. Just because your team is 12-3 against an occasional opponent means nothing the next time you meet them.

 

I've hated pre-season polls and their effect on early season rankings for years. Pre-seasons, based on last year's team (major components of which are likely gone), recruiting (which we know we can't be certan about for a couple of more years generally), and history/reputation of the team involved. To pick the low hanging fruit, how many times in the last twenty years have we seen Texas ranked preseason, and still ranked as they fell over time? There should not *be* any rankings until three or four weeks into the season, when there is actual usable data.

Of course, preseason ranking magazines and articles are a cottage industry now, so that will never happen.

 

Over the past nine seasons, the teams ranked Nos. 1, 2, 3 and 5 in the AP preseason poll have made the playoffs 7, 5, 4 and 5 times.

That's not bad at all, and you can't really credit the "high preseason ranking" for putting them in position to make the playoffs, since you pretty much have to win your conference --- or finish with just one loss.

ncaa.com/news/football/article/2023-07-24/how-ap-preseason-football-poll-predicts-college-football-playoff