College football favorites usually *don’t* win their conferences

As if college football could ever be accurately predicted.

College football is hard to predict, even when it comes to the basics. With a small sample size of only eight or nine conference games, and with all the players being of such a volatile age, nobody’s gonna get it right much more than half the time.

Here’s one look: Power 5 favorites, according to each conference’s official preseason polls from the last decade-plus, compared to who actually won each year.

The straight-up title record of conference favorites over this span is 27-33, with some conferences’ media faring more accurately than others. That record looks slightly better 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 hard sport to predict, even for people who are supposed to spend all their working hours studying it.

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

Just pick Oklahoma every year.

Ohio State is the Power 5's most frequent conference favorite and is usually a near-miss at worst.

Despite being the country's hardest conference to predict on a game-by-game basis, the Pac-12 might’ve had the easiest Power 5 champs to predict. Going back a few more years before 2006 would’ve made that even clearer, since USC would’ve tacked on multiple more.

The SEC media's record of picking champs compares fine with the Big Ten's or Big 12's as of late, but it’s the one most famously associated with a bad record (6-20 all-time), perhaps because only Alabama and a group of like four other schools ever have real chances to win it, so how hard could it be?

* 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 used the AP Poll as a tiebreaker. A previous version of this post used raw Big 12 vote counts.

*** For a few older Big Ten and Pac-10/12 seasons, I couldn't find official releases, so I used the AP. The favorites seemed quite clear for each year.

**** The Big Ten stopped doing an official poll this year — what decorum, valor, sanctity, and scholarship! — so Cleveland.com handles it annually.

***** National champ though, lol.