How Are Pre Season Expectations Formed

This is the time of the year when all college football fans are eagerly awaiting their first glimpse of their favorite teams in action. Most of us know little of what is to be expected of our teams until October comes around. Most of the teams in college football have been inactive for months and had to replace important parts of last years teams. The coaching staffs,  (some of them new) have been busy over the last months recruiting replacements for players long gone and contemplating new strategies to give them some small advantage when the next season begins. 

Given that most of us have no idea about how a team is performing in practice. Little or no information is coming out of the fall practice sessions, even for credentialed press people. How do we get these silly pre season polls and predictions from the football gurus? If you look at pre season polls they are never even close to being correct. If you look at conference picks they are usually wrong. The people who vote in these polls use a combination of last seasons play, rumor, innuendo, and uneducated guesses to rank our favorite teams. We know they have never been completely correct. We know that the pre season pundits are correct less than fifteen percent of the time. 

We take these pre season guesses for law and argue over them every year. I wonder how many sports gurus from New York or Las Angeles go down to our favorite college and watch practice every day? This is the only way to get a feel for the current team members and team performance. We will still take the guesses of these gurus as chiseled in stone fact and argue to our last breath that this is the way it will be come January.

The truth is this time of the year the local college paper and the local blogger is likely to have better information about your favorite school. The gurus are lost in oblivion this time of year and do not have the education to make an educated guess. The outlandish prediction that Notre Dame will go to the BCS Bowl this year. The prediction that Old Mississippi will win the SEC this year for the first time since 1963. These are just two of the shots in the dark that are based on pure fantasy. Where did the facts behind these predictions come from? Half of the top 25 teams will drop out by week three and possibly more. Where did the teams that are going to replace them come from? Why did the gurus not choose them to begin with? I wonder why the teams even bother to play when these knowledgeable gurus already know what is going to happen.

I try to write a few predictions every year. I do this using a combination of privileged information, as much knowledge as is available out of practice and the individual statistics for the last season of the returning players. I am never totally right, but, there are usually a few lucky predictions. I wonder what the gurus do to make them so revered in predicting instead of analyzing and commentating. I wonder where these pre season predictions come from.