Pre-season polls are everyone's favorite. Just like sitting next to a TCU fan on an airplane is everyone's favorite. These semi-meaningless rankings of college football teams never fail to incite debate (of both the civil and non-civil variety) and generate clicks for websites. Long have these polls been scoffed at for their abhorrent inaccuracies and their pumping up of certain neighbors to the Southeast. But are these claims valid? How accurately do these polls predict the final poll? Let's find out.
Methods
I took the AP pre-season polls from 2011 to 2014 and compared them with their respective final polls.