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A Quick Look at Cal Football AP Poll Rankings since 2002

Some journalists (*cough* Wilner and Ratto *cough*) love to point out about how Cal is consistently overrated by the media at the beginning only to fall through at the end. My first thought is if everyone knows about Cal's propensity to collapse, why rate Cal high in the first place?. But that's college football polls for you.

I thought I'd take a quick look and see if this phenomena is true for Cal. I decided to only look at the Tedford era, well because Cal football hadn't played since the the Synder days. Major thanks to AP Poll Archive, who has all the AP polls for the major NCAA sports since the '30s!

Many folks claim that the AP Poll should not begin ranking teams until the further into the season. I thought it would be interesting to see if that had any difference in how Cal performed ranking wise, so I also considered Cal's ranking at Week 3, Week 5 and Week 8 of the season.

  Pre-Season Wk3 Wk5 Wk8 End of Season Post Season
2002 NR NR NR NR NR NR
2003 NR NR NR NR NR NR
2004 12 10 7 7 4 9
2005 19 13 10 24 NR 25
2006 9 21 16 12 21 14
2007 12 6 3 18 NR NR
2008 NR NR NR NR NR NR
2009 12 6 NR NR NR NR


* NR = Not Rated

 

Now for the deltas...

  PS to Final 3 to final 5 to final 8 to final end to final PS to end 3 to end 5 to end 8 to end
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
3 1 -2 -2 -5 8 6 3 3
-6 -12 -15 -1 1 -7 -13 -16 -2
-5 7 2 -2 7 -12 0 -5 -9
-14 -20 -23 -8 0 -14 -20 -23 -8
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
-12 -6 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Avg -4.25 -3.75 -4.75 -1.625 0.375 -3.125 -3.375 -5.125 -2
Median -2.5 0 0 -0.5 0 0 0 0 0


* PS = Pre-Season

 

So for the most part Cal has been unranked. 2004-2006 seemed to be the best years for Cal in the AP Poll.  However most of the time when Cal has been ranked we've fallen disastrously short. 2004 and 2006 were exceptions.

I personally think this says more about the poll than it does about Cal. It's not Cal's fault that people aren't good at predicting what happens.

In the delta table I looked at the difference from one of the starting positions to the final poll (i.e. Post Season). Also because one can perhaps claim that the polls are meant to be for the end of the season and not post-season I also looked at from the starting positions to end of season. Also interesting to see is how the media did from end of season to post-season.

In general it seems that the pre-season guesses are not as good as the rest (with an odd anomaly for Week 5 which generally correlate to the first few Pac-10 games). But what's interesting is that by Week 8 the media is more reliable as to how they think Cal will perform by the end of the season.

In the grand scheme of things, this isn't very useful because you can't really draw any conclusions from it. Nonetheless it is interesting to see.

The opinions expressed in a FanPost are, in every way, reflective of the opinions of every California Golden Blogs Marshawnthusiast. Moreover, they are reflective of every employee of SBNation, including Tyler "Blez" Bleszinski.

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LOL @ 2008 line.

Dumbass AP.

Cooler than a Polar Bear's toenails.

by Thoroughbred on Apr 18, 2010 4:26 PM PDT reply actions  

Keep in mind the “regression to the mean” concept here. I’d expect, if you looked at every teams ranking like that, on average, teams would fall more than they’d rise. It’s just probability, when you start out so high, it’s more likely that you’re overrated than underrated.

by Missing Barry on Apr 18, 2010 5:28 PM PDT reply actions  

For Odin’s sake man, USE A PRONOUN!

"The American Prejudice against carp developed as follows, First we trashed our waters to the point where nothing but carp would survive in them. And then we blamed the carp for trashing the water."
- J. Robert Buffler and Thomas J. Dickson

by Maisbikkja on Apr 19, 2010 3:00 AM PDT via mobile reply actions  

Sorry. I wrote this piece by piece over a few hour period so grammatical mistakes popped up all over the place.

In other words, Go Bears!

by royrules22 on Apr 19, 2010 10:23 AM PDT up reply actions  

I kind of think the injuries we suffered in 2005 and 2007 sort of taint the data a bit, and it seems like there might need to be an asterisk or something for those years.

In 2009, I guess that’s sort of like a legit overrating. I personally didn’t really see us as the #12 team in the nation pre-season and figured us to be a 7-9 win team that year, but we didn’t really suffer any major injuries and yet we failed pretty hard that year.

But like you said, this isn’t so much about Cal sucking, so much as it’s about how the AP pollsters just don’t know how to evaluate a team.

www.californiagoldenblogs.com

by HydroTech on Apr 19, 2010 4:13 AM PDT reply actions  

what about jahvid?

Remember, the enemy's end zone is DOWN!

by GoldBlooded on Apr 19, 2010 12:59 PM PDT up reply actions  

Yeah, I thought about this after I wrote my comment. I guess that didn’t really register in my mind since we had a capable backup. But in 2005 and 2007… I’m not quite so sure we had capable backups to Longshore.

www.californiagoldenblogs.com

by HydroTech on Apr 19, 2010 3:06 PM PDT up reply actions  

agreed

Remember, the enemy's end zone is DOWN!

by GoldBlooded on Apr 19, 2010 3:58 PM PDT up reply actions  

They only had it twice, tho

CGB's Jimmy Carter

www.CaliforniaGoldenBlogs.com

by TwistNHook on Apr 19, 2010 7:17 AM PDT up reply actions  

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