I would assume he will have Notre Dame undefeated after their 10-1 last year

There’s been enough print claiming the Buckeyes are slow and can’t match up with other teams. Ever since they lost to Florida in the 2006 MNC game they have a reputation of losing in big non-conference game. Notre Dame has largely been hammered for being unable to win a postseason game prior to winning the 2008 Hawaii Bowl. No one expects them to win the big game, and they have met expectations.

“Overrated” means they are praised in the media or by fans, but never can meet expectations or have somehow managed to have their frequent foibles go underreported. To me, schools like Oklahoma and USC are overrated.

I know fans of the winning “underdog” teams like to chant it, and oftentimes the polls do have teams ranked too high or too low, but that’s usually a consequence of their record at the time. Like last year, I did not think Alabama (or Texas Tech) was the best team in the country during the season, but how do you not rank basically the only undefeated team(s) at the top? Sometimes you have a weaker schedule that allows you to climb higher in the rankings than you should, and sometimes you have some unlucky breaks and lose a game you should have won (like last year, no one can make me believe Iowa was a better team, so even though they beat us, I wouldn’t say we were over rated, at least by any significant amount, despite the chants).

But how can the media realistically rank over/under rated teams? The moment they make whatever statement they make, then that team should become “properly rated”, except that their new “rating” probably isn’t accurate, either. I suppose you can say teams are overrated if they are consistently ranked higher in the pre-season than they are at the end of the season (and I recall recently seeing an analysis like this, and I think OSU finished tied for 5th most overrated team)

It is undeniable, though, that OSU has been very successful in recent years, and they seem to be pretty accurately rated, at least as far as final rankings go.

It was in the ESPN magazine CFB preview issue.

Another article they had in there was their Eliminator. They went through the statistics for each conference & looked for common stats for the winner for the last five years. For the Big Ten, they used defensive passing yards under 212 ypg, non-QB lead the team in rushing, etc. & ended up picking us. They also did an Eliminator for the national title & come up with Florida. The interesting thing is that they compared only the top ten teams in their prediction for the season. They have us at 12. When I went through the criteria for Penn State, we would have survived all the rounds. Here is a link, but I think you need to be an Insider to see it: http://insider.espn.go.com/ncf/insider/news/story?id=4393403. You could also glance the magazine itself to see it.