Most of the time, college football conference favorites don't win their leagues – SB Nation

Seeing as it’s college football conference media days season, it’s also the time of year for conferences to release their official preseason polls. This means we now learn exactly where each team in the country is expected to land at the end of the year.

The Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC have released their polls (the ACC and Big Ten go next week, but seem pretty obvious), so let’s take a look at the previous decade of these things.

The straight-up title record of conference favorites over that span is 19-31, with some conference’s media faring more accurately than others. That record looks slightly better (22-28) if we give full credit for split championships in which the conference favorite lost a head-to-head game against another co-champ, but that’s the Participation Trophy of conference titles.

To the records, which show this is a pretty hard sport to predict, even for people who spend all their working hours studying it.

ACC

The ACC is usually pretty easy to predict, because there are only so many serious football schools.

Big 12

That’s a real long run of near-miss picks, unless you count OU’s split with K-State in 2012. The Big 12 did!

Also, Oklahoma has four straight-up conference titles in this span as a non-favorite, but only one as a favorite, despite being picked almost every other year. TCU, 2016 Playoff!

Big Ten

Even if Michigan were to be named the B1G’s favorite this year, OSU would still be the Power 5’s most frequent conference favorite over the last decade.

Pac-12

Despite being the country’s hardest conference to predict on a game-by-game basis, the Pac-12 has been the easiest Power 5 league to call over the last decade. Going back a few more years would make that even clearer, since USC would tack on multiple more.

I had no recollection of USC being the favorite last year, and that still turned out to be an OK pick somehow.

SEC

SEC media’s record of picking champs compares fine with the Big Ten’s or Big 12’s, but that 2015 pick will stand out like a toot in church for a long time. Some of us tried to tell them Will Muschamp isn’t a miracle worker and backup QBs aren’t necessarily better than outgoing starters, but did they listen?

* In the event of tiebreakers, I listed the head-to-head winner.

** Big 12 polls until 2010 only listed division favorites, not conference favorites, so I’m going with the division favorite that got more votes.

*** For a few older Big Ten and Pac-12 seasons, I couldn’t find official releases, so I used the AP poll. The favorites seemed quite clear for each year.

**** The Big Ten no longer does an official poll, but the Cleveland Plain-Dealer annually polls B1G media now.

***** National champ though, lol.

Elsewhere!

Mike Leach ascended to his throne as king of all media days, weighing in on Brexit, Pokemon, the Heisman, a 16-team Playoff and more.

Monroe, Louisiana police take issue with Nick Saban’s assertion (according to Paul Finebaum) that LSU fandom factored into their arrest of a Bama star.

Bill C team of the day: Indiana, where the song remains the same. It’s a song about POINTS.

(No, Tennessee being a hyped media favorite does not happen every year. Been a long time, actually.)

Hugh Freeze said a bunch of stuff about Ole Miss and the NCAA, but the only interesting part might’ve been saying, “the truth is probably somewhere in the middle,” between what the Rebels have claimed and what the NCAA has alleged. I don’t know if he meant it exactly that way.

There might be several reasons Baylor chose this AD to hire, but chief among them is this: he knows Tom Herman. (Meanwhile, a full Herman-to-Baylor rumor came and went in the course of about an hour Thursday.)

RRRANKING 2016’s oddest neutral-site games, and folks, this is the oddest year yet.

TCU’s reportedly adding a former five-star running back from Michigan.

PREVIOUS: Bret Bielema, heir to Steve Spurrier as the don of SEC Media Days.

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