Pre-Season Hype: Teams That Will Not Meet Expectations

The preseason poll has become an institution in college football. We've all seem them, read them, and many of us have created them.

But preseason polls rarely live up to their hype. Only 10 teams have been ranked the preseason No. 1 and won a National Championship.

With that in mind, there are several teams that appear in the top 25 that are just not going to live up to the hype this year and are going to under-perform.

The preseason rankings used in this article are an average of 23 professionally produced preseason polls. These polls range from Rivals.com to ESPN to the Atlanta-Journal Constitution.

So what will make a team under-perform this year? Two words: offensive line. That's right, the most important positions, after the QB of course, are on the offensive line. Games are won in the trenches with experienced offensive lines.

With that being said, here are the teams that are currently ranked in the pre-season top 25 that are NOT going to be ranked that high by the seasons end or will disappoint.

Ranking	Team	O-line Career Starts
3	Oklahoma	32
11	Penn State	39
12	Boise State	40
13	Oregon	20
23	Kansas	26
25	BYU	23

To put those numbers in perspective, the average team going into the 2009 College Football Season has 65 career starts on their Offensive line. Oregon has the third least experienced line in the country and Oklahoma loses 100 career starts from last year.

Teams that are going to perform better or at their level include Virginia Tech with 90 starts, USC with 91, Oklahoma State with 91, Texas with 91, Georgia with 99, Notre Dame with 100, Iowa with 99, Florida State with 89, and East Carolina with 114.