For reference, six of 2006's preseason top 10 were in the final top 10, with the other four falling back to the teens. In 2005, only five of the preseason top 10 made the final top 10, with two falling to the teens, one to the twenties, and two falling out altogether.
Chris Fowler published an article around midseason last October about the travails of the pollsters. It does a good job crystallizing the tumult that occurred between the relatively tame differences of the first and final polls.
In short, a lot goes back to the fact that road teams won a lot more often than they should have.
So What About 2008?
The headline of Fowler's piece is "Inconsistent teams creating rankings chaos." If you look at the quarterbacks of many of the top teams from the 2007 preseason poll, you can see why.
USC, Virginia Tech, Michigan, West Virginia, UCLA, and Cal had injuries. LSU, Ohio State, and Wisconsin had first year starters. Oklahoma didn't just have a first year starter, but a freshman starter. Texas' starter had a sophomore slump behind a suspect line. Florida was one school without a question mark behind center, but it had plenty of them on the other side of the ball.
Fast forward a year and look at the early preseason consensus for 2008. Of the top 10, only USC and LSU are breaking in a new starter. Expand it to the top 20, and that adds only Auburn, Wisconsin, and Penn State. Injuries will happen, of course, but there's no way to count those yet.
Basically, all of this decade's powers are ready to roll. Only LSU, and to a lesser extent, USC, aren't directly building on last year with roughly the same cast.
Another cause of instability in 2007 was the emergence of programs that had not been to the top either recently or at all. USF fell after not knowing how to deal with soaring, Kansas lost the only big game of its regular season, and Missouri couldn't beat Oklahoma.
Those teams have tasted the sky and in theory should be able to better handle its intoxicating effects. All three will have the chance to prove this true or untrue, especially when Kansas takes a trip down to Tampa to play the Bulls.
A Historical Note
Being a native Floridian, I tend to relate things to hurricanes.
Hurricanes are cyclical phenomena, gradually changing from less to more to less frequent. As with everything that is cyclical, you sometimes end up with a big peak or big valley if things align properly.
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