Most Frequently Overrated/Underrated ACC Teams

This week's Bourbon Shots included a link to an article from the GT blog called Margin of Hype vs. Margin of Excellence (From The Rumble Seat) that examined which teams tend to get overrated and underrated by the media following ACC Media Days.  A good idea, but in the spirit of ACC academic rivalry I thought I'd post my own analysis, which unlike the GT blog is based in "theory" and "mathematical correctness" and other useful things that come along with a degree from the finest "Tech" in the ACC!

Let's start by examining shortfalls in the existing analysis by looking at Miami, which From the Rumble Seat claims is the second most ovverrated team in the conference.  Presented as evidence is a graph showing that the range of preseason predicted finishes goes from 2nd to 5th, with the average actual finish being 3.4.  Average is irrelevant here - if in four seasons they were picked preseason to be 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and fifth and those predictions were correct every time, then displaying an average finish of 3.5 is meaningless and does nothing to say whether or not they were underrated or overrated.

So what we are really most interested in is whether or not the difference between the predicted and actual finish each season tends to be around 0 (meaning there is no evidence of bias seen in the preseason picks for that team), positive (meaning there is evidence that the team tends to be underrated), or negative (meaning there is evidence the team tends to be overrated).

I calculated this difference for every team for the 2005-2009 seasons.  Before jumping into who finished where, it's important to first do a statistical test to determine whether or not the differences between teams are real, or just randomness fooling us.  It turns out there is ample evidence that one or more teams in our conference are rated differently than the others relative to their ultimate performance (for the geeks out there I ran a One-Way ANOVA in Minitab 16 with a resulting p-value of 0.032).

So who turned out to be perennially overrated and who turned out to be underrated?

At the "most overrated" end of the spectrum, we have Florida State in a runaway.  They are ranked in the preseason, on average, about one and a half spots ahead of where the ultimately end up.  At the "underrated" end?  Boston College, who on average gets ranked about two spots below where the end up in their divisional standings.  Although there appear to be differences in the others, keep in mind that the significant overlap in the bars on this picture between any two other teams means that we cannot statistically tell them apart (with a few more seasons we might be able to if a difference exists).  To be fair to Georgia Tech, they have been underrated usually.

As for VT, we're sitting in a nice spot - not typically over- or underrated.  Of course, when you're picked #1 most seasons it becomes difficult to be underrated...