Preseason Polls: How Often Do Consensus BCS Picks Come True?

If you’ve never looked at football.stassen.com, you ought to take a look. It has a lot of great resources for college football research.

One of the best things on the site is the compilation of the preseason consensus. It allows you to see what everyone was thinking before the season starts, and it goes back to 1993.

I decided to go back and look to see how good the preseason consensus was at predicting BCS participants.

By Preseason Conference Rankings

I first looked to see where the BCS conference participants were ranked in the preseason standings.

As it turns out, there’s almost always one wild card in the BCS. Every year except two—1998 and 2003—had a team ranked fifth or below in its conference/division make the BCS. The 2003 season was anomalous in that the BCS had six first place picks and two second place picks in it. The 1998 season had five first place picks, two second place picks, and one third place pick.

The lowest-picked teams to make the BCS were 1999 Stanford and 2002 Iowa who both were picked eighth in their conferences.

Only three seasons had more than four first place conference/division picks make the BCS. I’ve already mentioned ‘98 and ‘03, and the third was 2001 with five. However rather than being totally orderly, ‘01 also had two seventh place picks make it in Maryland and Illinois.

Here is a table showing the frequency of making the BCS for each preseason conference/division ranking.

First Place Picks

Here is a table of how well the teams that were picked first in their conferences or divisions did at getting into the BCS.

“1s in BCS” refers to how many first place picks from the conference made the BCS. “BCS Teams” tells how many total BCS teams the conference has fielded. “Tot. 1 Picks” tells how many total first place picks the conference had in the BCS era. For conferences without divisions, it’s one a year; for conferences with divisions, it’s two a year.