Does college football's preseason AP poll predict the final AP poll?

Is the preseason AP poll always a good indicator of how the upcoming college football season will go?

After looking at AP rankings from 2010 through the 2019 season, we’re fairly sure that answer is no. It's even more unlikely that the 2020 preseason poll will be an accurate indicator of this season's final standings, rankings and game results, since teams that won't be playing a fall season are eligible to receive votes in the preseason poll.

Over the past 10 years, 250 teams have been ranked in the preseason Top 25. Of those, 156 were still ranked in the final poll. That’s 62.4 percent. And even the ones that stayed ranked rarely held their position.

That also means that 94 teams that were not ranked in the preseason poll ended up in the final Top 25.

Of those 94, 18 managed to make it all the way to the final top 10. One — Auburn in 2013 — found its way to the No. 2 spot by the end of the year. The Tigers had finished 3-9 in 2012, but led by Tre Mason and Nick Marshall, they went 12-2 in 2013, making it to the last-ever BCS championship, which they lost 34-31 to Florida State.

Just last season, Minnesota went from not ranked in the preseason poll to No. 10 in the final AP poll.

And then there’s the flip side: The falls from grace. 

Since 2010, 50 teams have started the season in the Top 5. Of those, seven were unranked at the end of the year:

None of those were more surprising than USC in 2012.

After returning 18 starters (including 13 All-Pac-12 players) from a team that went 10-2 and finished No. 6 in the AP poll, the Trojans earned the No. 1 spot in 2012’s preseason rankings. Then they went 7-6, highlighted by losses to No. 21 Stanford and unranked Arizona. USC became the first team since Mississippi in 1964 to start No. 1 in the AP poll and finish unranked.

Preseason polls are, at best, really good guestimates. Throughout the course of the season, teams will suffer injuries, watch highly-touted players fall short of expectations, unheralded players become stars, veterans have breakout seasons, and many more unpredictable storylines. With so many teams in the FBS, it would be an extremely impressive feat to predict all the chaos that will unfold in a long season.

So, if your team is hyped up enough to land a top-5 spot in the first AP poll of the 2020 season, maybe hold off on buying your CFP tickets for just a little while. And if you’re outside the Top 25, don’t give up hope. You never know.

If you want to take a look at past results yourself, here is a table of every team that has started the season ranked, and where they ended up in the final AP poll: