Take the five-year average of the 247Sports Composite team rankings without consideration for player attrition, player development, transfers or other factors, and what do you get? This.
Here’s where your last 10 national champions rank on this list: Clemson (No. 12), Alabama (No. 1), Ohio State (No. 2), Florida State (No. 4), Auburn (No. 7), Florida (No. 10), LSU (No. 3)
Perhaps underperforming relative to their talent: Georgia (No. 5), Notre Dame (No. 8), Texas A&M (No. 9), Tennessee (No. 11), UCLA (No. 13)
“Perhaps”? Thanks for being kind.
Get The Picture 
Same song 15th verse on Georgia underperforming, so why does #6 USC get a pass on the under performing? Can we chalk that up to liberal media bias for the Hollywood school?
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They have college football in Cali?
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They have a college in Cali?
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UGA under performing?
Now having said that, these class rankings over the last 5 years only factor in the exit ranking, not how the classed turned out over time. For example, we had two classes ’12, ’13 that started out ranked fairly high, but ended up being disasters. Suffice it to say, Georgia has a lot of room for improvement.
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’12 is gone now. Because we’ve retained (so far) a lot of fairly decent players as 5th year players for this coming year, the class of ’13 for this year only is not a liability.
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Boy that 2016 class must have really bumped up our average, since we all know there was zero talent when Kirby got here.
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Exactly why there is too much “absolute confidence” placed in team rankings before they actually play. So much depends on whether you get the exact pieces, they develop as projected, and are available for all the key games. Also, being the 7th best class nationally, but 4th or 5th best in your conference is pretty significant too. Not saying there aren’t correlations to class rankings, nor that it isn’t a big piece, but it is not the total answer.
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Think of this: If Georgia only loses in 2017 to schools that rank above it on this list, and wins every game against teams that rank below it, we’ll finish the regular season at 12-0. Assuming we would play Bama in the SECCG, we’d lose that, but we’d win our bowl as long as we’re not paired against Ohio State or Florida State, and we’d finish 13-1. The fact that that outcome is hard to swallow shows how much we’ve under performed.
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This analysis is spot on and you could repeat it over and over basically for every UGA team since 2007. What about 2012 you ask? That team lost in embarrassing fashion to South Carolina–a team that was good but nobody could say with a straight face that the Dicks…er…Cocks had personnel as good as the Dawgs had. Coaching was the reason for the consistent under performance. The Dawgs got outcoached in just about every major game they played for years. I actually think CMR got outcoached in a whole lot of games the Dawgs won. The team just saved his bacon by playing better than the other team in spite of him. I hate to say it but I saw a lot of that last year, too.
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Let me add, I would like to know what the top coaches really think of CMR. Urban, Nick, The Hat, SOS, Dantonio, Big Game Bob, Jimbo, Dabo–guys like that. I think I know. The Laner let the curtain slip open a little in ’09 by shooting off his mouth.
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It would be interesting to see an analysis of players drafted or making the NFL for these same years from each school.
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And I think it was the championships of Auburn and Florida, both below us on the list yet bitter rivals, that stuck in the craw of the BM folks and boosters pulling strings…more so than Bama.
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Perhaps underachieving? Boy, that is a gentle way to put it.
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