College Football Expectations vs. Reality

College football offseason media days are always interesting sites.

One main tradition to kick off the year is pre-season rankings. Media members in each conference gather to vote on how they think the conference rankings will end up at the year’s end.

Sometimes, it’s easy to predict the best team from the conference. For example, it’d be a safe bet to pick Alabama every year.

But even then, the Tide has won a national championship recently without winning their conference.

In fact, it’s become somewhat comical how bad the media that covers the SEC is at predicting the year’s champion.  So bad in fact, you would almost they didn’t pick your favorite team.

The SEC media prediction has only been correct five times in the last 23 years. Though, they managed to correctly pick Alabama last season.

For 2015, they selected Auburn – who currently sits in last place in the Western division with a 2-4 conference record.

Georgia was picked to win the East, but Florida clinched the division with a win over Vanderbilt.

Even more, the up and downs of a college football season can be exhausting.

Take Ole Miss for example.

They beat Alabama, and things looked great. They were all but inked in for a spot in the College Football Playoff. Then came two losses to Florida and Memphis.

But if they could win out their SEC schedule – including a game against LSU – they controlled their own destiny. The goal of a SEC championship was still very much in play.

Then came a heartbreaking loss to Arkansas in overtime, and now, the Rebels are in the outside looking in despite a promising start to the year.

If there are any lessons to be learned from this (other than the SEC conference schedule can be a coach’s worst nightmare) it’s that sometimes what we expect to happen is often very different from what will actually happen.