Matt Melton goes to the AP Poll well once more, looking at the last decade’s underrated and overrated teams based on the final AP Poll rankings. His metric:
To do that I looked at the final AP Poll ranking of every Power 5 team since 2005. I then ran a regression analysis based on their record and final poll position. This regression spit out a formula. I used this formula to reverse-engineer the poll ranking of all the ranked Power 5 teams and determined which teams were the most over or underrated. If you want the results, skip on down, but I wanted to give some background and caveats before delving into them.
I only looked at teams that were in either the ACC, Big 10, Big 12, Pac-10/12, or SEC during the season in question. The Big East, with future Power 5 members Louisville, Pittsburgh, Rutgers, Syracuse, and West Virginia, was a BCS conference during this time frame, but I left those teams out when they were Big East members because I thought it would skew the results. Similarly, when Utah and TCU were Mountain West members, their final rankings were not included in this analysis. Other current mid-majors like Boise State, BYU, and Central Michigan were also left out. The regression analysis produced an R squared value of .7868 between winning percentage and final ranking with a regression formula of: -74.675*(win %) +71.347.
The 2007 Georgia squad makes the overrated list. There is no Georgia entry on his underrated list (surprise!), but it’s the last group he comes up with that’s of interest.
And finally here is a list of teams that probably should have finished ranked based on their record, but ultimately did not.
There’s only one team in the last eleven seasons that managed a double-digit season in wins — playing an SEC schedule, mind you! — and didn’t finish ranked. The AP managed to Dawgrade an entire season. Impressive.
The BCS is gone, its all about perception now. 2015 was the single ugliest 10 win season in the history of college football. Narrow, snoozer wins against Mizzou, GaSo, auburn, and tech and curb stompings on CBS against Bama, Florida, plus widespread rumors of a wildly dysfunctional staff tend to shape a perception. Not to mention, most people are now firmly in the “show me” camp on UGA now until we back up the bulldog bark with something more than a puppy dog bite.
Absolutely not a knock on Mark Richt, that could have and probably should’ve been a 7 win season.
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That’s like saying Miss Utah was the single ugliest contestant in a given year’s Miss USA Pageant. Maybe so, but that still means she’s more attractive than 98% of the people walking around out there.
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Did I is say winning 10 games is bad? No, I said it was an ugly 10 wins and the team was perceived as bad.
Who here felt really good about the product on the field 2015 and had great hope for 2016? I read this blog every day then, as I do now,and the overall tone wasn’t a sunny one.
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Did I say you said it’s bad?
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“That’s like saying Miss Utah was the single ugliest contestant in a given year’s Miss USA Pageant. Maybe so, but that still means she’s more attractive than 98% of the people walking around out there.”
Pretty heavy dose of snark there for an accurate statement, though “In the history of college football” may have been a bit hyperbolic. I don’t watch all teams like I do UGA but I can’t think of another P-5 10 win team that flat out looked as bad as 2015 UGA.
Snark aside, my original post was about the perception not the actual quality of the team and deserved ranking.
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Ya’ll might want to google Miss Utah, 2016, before we start dawg-grading.
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2015, sorry. Although 2016 isn’t bad either.
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Not bad.
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And it was ugly, particularly on the offensive side….excruciating is a word that comes to mind. I am pretty confident Schotty would have been gone after that season, CMR should have taken over the playcalling by mid-season, imo. But a 10 win season in the SEC should be a ranked team every year, every single year. People can down play it all they want but 10-3 at UGA puts you in the Top 25, we were punished for the ugliness.
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Mac, I think you can make a legit argument that, in essence, Richt did so after the Missouri game.
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IF I was him, I wouldn’t want any credit for the play calling in Jax….
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Give me an ugly win any day…they all count the same.
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At the end of the day, as Greg states, the team with the most points wins. Ugly wins sure beats, damn we lost, but hey we looked good doing it.
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I sure as hell would have taken 10 ugly wins last year. Tech and Vandy come to mind.
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At least we beat 2 ranked teams last year. That wasn’t something happening on a regular basis.
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That data bolsters your analysis about 2015 from yesterday. While the season didn’t meet expectations, that team didn’t deserve its fate in the final rankings. Sure, they were beaten badly by the eventual national champions, lost a winnable game at Tennessee to the “champions of life,” and spit the bit against Florida. They also sent the OBS into retirement with an epic beat down, beat Auburn and Boom on the Plains, were a bogus 4th down taunting call away from shutting out the Genius, and beat James Franklin in a bowl game.
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Ten ugly wins is still ten wins.
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Shotty, the Bauta fiasco, the dysfunctional coaching staff, the Chubb injury, the rain game, the dismissals, the armed security at the team meetings, the lies from the AD…
Good times 😦
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The number of times that these sorts of stats reviews come up with UGA sticking out like a sore thumb are really incredible.
It’s like Richt didnt want to finish the game and just started doing all the side missions.
win 10 games but finish unranked – Achievement unlocked!
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Comment of the Day.
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Please explain to me why any rational person would have fired what’s-his-name? after that season, again.
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Scorpio, are you remembering the years 2006 through 2014 clearly? There are recaps of various humiliations and almost-great-but-not-quite moments on ESPN or CBS Sports if you want to re-live them.
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This again? What was the best team UGA beat that year? Penn St, I suppose…
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This whole thing is funny to me. Granted, over and underrated is, by nature, subjective. However, mixing in statistical analysis to expose the facts of something that is subjective is preposterous.
It’s almost like polling a hundred people to find out their favorite ice cream flavor, finding out that 65% say chocolate, and then declaring chocolate to be the best flavor (which would be wrong, as it’s vanilla, but I digress). Further, it would be like stating that something is wrong with the local 31 Flavors because they sell more vanilla than chocolate. Ergo, chocolate is overrated, right?
Point is, people thought Georgia would be a very good team many years, and they weren’t. If every year played out the exact same, but people thought Georgia would be mediocre (~35th best team), what difference would that make?
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I think the purpose of using regression analysis is to take subjectivity out of this. Statistically the NUMBERS say that the pollsters were every bit as wrong as the anti-Richt crowd was….going 10-3 in the SEC is always a top 25 season and should have been no. 14 which means objectively and statistically given injuries and palace intrigue CMR did a helluva coaching job and still got fired because of expectations and perceptions.
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Agree w/ the ’15 season in terms of “should have been ranked,” but there were plenty of other seasons where I think the expectations were fair, and we failed to come close to meeting them.
Regardless, the ’15 team did not at all look like the #13 team in the country, regardless of record.
Richt got fired because he hadn’t won the SEC in 10 years (yeah, I know how close we were once or twice), and because, as evidenced by last season, we weren’t exactly on the cusp of winning another.
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Sooooo, UGA will probably be favored in every game this year. If we finish 10-3 are you guys going to be bitching about what a shitty 10-3 team we are? I mean, that will mean we lost 3 games we should not have lost. How about 11-1, with one blow out loss? I guess that would be pretty shitty too. Just asking.
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10-3 tells me the OL rebuild is on track…that was/is our biggest issue.
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If those 3 losses are to UT, UF, and tech, yes. I will be bitching. Maybe not how shitty we are, depends on the eye test during the game, but WITF can we not compete with those guys? And WITF can’t we defense an option offense slightly less dated than the veer? Although now that I think about it, THAT could be Karma from laughing at all the CPJ jokes.
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Going to OT against Ga Southern just doesn’t win many votes of confidence.
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We don’t need the AP to Dawggrade that season. We’ve done ourselves quite nicely.
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7 – 5 (and still losing to rivals) is always better than 10 – 2 when you’re inserting your will, recruiting, getting buildings built, hiring analysts by the dozens, raising ticket prices and giving fans a chance to purchase extra tickets for Appy St. and Samford, I feel better already.
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Thank you. I’ve been saying forever that 2007 team was vastly overrated. Perhaps the most overrated UGA team in my lifetime.
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I still enjoyed them beating the bloody piss out of Hawaii in the Sugar Bowl, making Mark May look like a doofus.
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2007 was the bizarro year. They were one of the best 3 teams in the country at the end of the year.
If you want to say that about the 2008 team, I get it, but the 2007 team was ranked exactly where they should have been at the end of the year.
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Can’t we all just get along?
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and the beat and bitching goes on. An alien will come down in the year 2525 and ancestors will still be talking bout Richt and his failures, etc. I used to say time to move on, given up on that.
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