The preseason AP Top 25 is all about hope and optimism.
Reality Check is all about, well, being realistic. Sometimes the truth can be painful.
As has become tradition, the first AP Top 25 Reality Check of the season is a reminder that your promising college football team, newly minted with a cool ranking as it heads into the season, might turn out to be not as good as you and the poll voters thought.
Alabama is No. 1, followed by Oklahoma, Clemson and Ohio State in the poll presented by Regions Bank and released Monday.
From 2010-2020, on average, 9.5 teams that appeared in the preseason Top 25 finished the season unranked — about 38% of the picks. During that time, the fewest preseason ranked teams to finish outside the final Top 25 was seven in 2011; the most was 12, in 2010.
Even in an anything-but-normal 2020 season played through the pandemic, the number of teams that started the season ranked only to finish unranked was a typical 10.
What was unusual about last season was the number of flameouts that came from the upper half of the preseason Top 25.
Over the last 11 seasons, 17 teams that started the season ranked in the top 10 finished unranked, just 1.5 per season. But last year, three top 10 teams — and five among the top 12 in the preseason rankings — did not finish the season ranked, led by 2019 national champion LSU, which was No. 6 going into last season.
As expected, most of the preseason ranked teams that fail to make the final Top 25 come from the bottom of the rankings. Teams ranked 21-25 in the preseason make up 27% of the teams (28 total) that finished unranked.
To put it another way, a little more than half the teams that started the season ranked between 21-25 from 2010-20, finished unranked.
At the top of the poll? Only seven preseason top-five teams over that span have failed to be ranked somewhere in the final Top 25.
How likely is your team to be one of the disappointments?
No. 1 Alabama (13-0 last year)
Opener: vs. Miami in Atlanta, Sept. 4.
Reality check: The Crimson Tide have not finished ranked lower than 10th the last 13 seasons. There is no reason to believe this season’s defending champion is vulnerable to an LSU-type tumble.
