What's The Most Accurate College Football Preview Magazine?

PunditTracker|published: Mon 19th August, 10:10 2013

Republished with permission from PunditTracker.

We analyzed the projections of four of the most popular college football preview magazines: Athlon, Lindy's, Phil Steele's 2013 College Football Preview, and Sporting News. We looked at their top-15 preseason rankings for each of the past five seasons, grading them against the corresponding final Associated Press rankings.

As with our NFL mock draft grades, we calculated several scoring metrics:

Variability: The difference between when each team was projected to finish and where the team actually finished. A lower score is better.

Median Error: Similar concept as variability, but the median is less impacted by "outliers" (i.e. picks that are way off). Again, lower is better.

Hit Rate: Percentage of projections that were at most one spot off. For instance, picking Alabama to finish No. 2 when the team actually finished No. 3 would be graded as correct. In this case, a higher percentage is better.

Here are the results:

Variability	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	Average
Lindy's	11.7	10.9	12.0	9.0	12.0	11.1
Sporting News	11.9	11.1	11.3	8.7	12.2	11.1
Athlon	11.7	12.1	12.0	11.7	10.8	11.7
Phil Steele	11.3	13.2	11.9	11.1	11.2	11.7
Average	11.7	11.8	11.8	10.2	11.6	11.4

Median Error	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	Average
Sporting News	12.0	9.0	8.0	5.0	9.0	8.6
Lindy's	12.0	8.0	9.0	4.0	11.0	8.8
Athlon	11.0	10.0	9.0	9.0	8.0	9.4
Phil Steele	11.0	12.0	12.0	10.0	11.0	11.2
Average	11.5	9.8	9.5	7.0	9.8	9.5

Hit Rate	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	Average
Lindy's	13%	20%	13%	47%	27%	24%
Athlon	20%	33%	7%	20%	27%	21%
Sporting News	20%	20%	7%	33%	13%	19%
Phil Steele	33%	13%	7%	13%	7%	15%
Average	22%	22%	8%	28%	18%	20%

Sporting News and Lindy's have been the best performers on average, posting both the lowest Variability scores and Median Errors (which we consider to be more relevant metrics than hit rate). Most of the difference can be attributed to their superior performance in both 2009 and 2011, seasons in which Athlon and Phil Steele made a few notable flubs (more on these shortly).

Let's look at how the magazines' BCS champion picks have fared, with the actual result of each team in parentheses.

Champion Pick	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012
Athlon	Florida (1)	Florida (3)	Alabama (10)	Alabama (1)	USC (N/A)
Phil Steele	Florida (1)	Florida (3)	Oklahoma (6)	Alabama (1)	Florida State (10)
Lindy's	Georgia (13)	Florida (3)	Alabama (10)	Oklahoma (16)	LSU (14)
Sporting News	Georgia (13)	Florida (3)	Alabama (10)	LSU (2)	LSU (14)

Alabama fans may have reason to wince at this spotty record, considering that all four magazines are picking the Crimson Tide to win the title this year. The Sporting News has Stanford at No. 2, while the others all have Ohio State.

The group had major collective whiffs in three of the five seasons:

Oklahoma (2009): All four had Oklahoma in the top four. The Sooners finished unranked.

Florida (2010): All four had Florida between No. 5 and No. 7. The Gators finished unranked.

USC (2012): All four had USC in the top four. The Trojans finished unranked.

For a detailed list of all the notable hits and miss, click here.

Think you can do better than these "experts"? There is still time left to make your own college football predictions ( click here), including the winners of the BCS championship, Heisman Trophy, and various bowl games.

PunditTracker's mission is to bring accountability to the prediction industry by cataloging and scoring the predictions of pundits. Photo via Getty.