Blogpoll Roundtable: Overrated/Underrated

Roundtables are a group discussion amongst the members of the blogpoll normally, but for our purposes this time a little more introspection is needed. The exercise, brought to us by Blogpoll founder Brain at mgoblog, is to look back at my pre-season blogpoll and decide if there was anyone overrated and underrated. Well, if the picture to the left is any indication, yes and yes!. I swear, the more I look at my first poll the more I feel like I'm back in college.

Something you have to remember is that you don't want to pick someone's rank based on their schedule. Otherwise, you get teams at the top of your poll that wouldn't last five minutes in some of the other conferences. And they usually get stomped in the bowl game and make you look ridiculously silly.




Overrated

The first and biggest mistake that comes to mind is Miami. How much did I have to drink that night? Sure they're down at the bottom of the poll, #24. But are they even that good? They return nine starters on offense and seven on defense, but they were 7-6 last year. And they barely beat Nevada, 21-20 in the MPC Computers Bowl for crying out loud. They have a new coach and Kyle Wright is still there. What more do I have to say?




Honorable Mention: West Virginia (what, too self deprecating?), Florida St., Florida, Georgia.



Underrated



Lou Holths vocabulary, only because we can't understand a word he says. I don't know, how bout Penn St.? I'm not saying they are going to win the Big 10 or the Big 11, but 16 seems a little too far down. They'll be young on defense with only 5 returning starters, and a plethora of underclassmen moving into starting positions. But the offense has eight returning starters. And they actually did show us something against Tennessee last year in the bowl game. The 9-4 record from a year ago is kind of misleading, because outside of the Notre Dame loss, they played everyone tough. Ohio St. needed a very late charge to make the 28-6 win look like they had it under control, and losses to Michigan and Wisconsin were seven and 10 points respectively. If the defense comes through at all, they should be a lot better than the #16 team in the country.


Honorable Mention: Louisville, Tennessee, UCLA.