SMQ: When new Top 25 teams fall out of college football polls after one week

USC and Maryland leaped up into the college football AP Top 25 last week for the first time this season. A week later, they’ll bounce right back out.

Every year, the first month of the season leads to a variety of teams getting a hand at consolidating position in the AP Top 25. Once teams that were lightly regarded in the preseason start to play actual games and generate real results to evaluate, we often find that certain teams are far better than anticipated.

Sometimes, though, we get too excited about a single result and lift up a program that really has no business being ranked. Even knowing the danger of reading too much into one game, it is an all-too-human impulse that can be hard to arrest.

That was the case for a pair of newly-minted Top 25 squads after Week 2 was in the books. After taking down then-No. 22 Syracuse in a 63-20 evisceration, Maryland was elevated up into their spot in the AP poll. In similar fashion, the showdown in Los Angeles between No. 23 Stanford and unranked USC resulted in a 45-20 mismatch that launched the Trojans into the Top 25 for the first time this season.

The prevailing sentiment after the first fortnight of the season was that Clay Helton had finally found his next Sam Darnold and that the Terrapins were a sleeping giant finally awakening under Mike Locksley. A week later, how quickly those perceptions shift.

Both the Trojans and the Terrapins will almost certainly tumble completely out of the polls and into the ranks of the others receiving votes.

We see a similar story play out every college football season.

In 2018, Florida and South Carolina were elevated into last two spots of the AP Top 25 after their Week 1 wins over FCS Charleston Southern and FBS neophyte Coastal Carolina. A week later, the Gators lost to Kentucky and the Gamecocks fell against Georgia, leading both teams to fall right back out.

Into that vacant space jumped Arizona State after a 13-10 shocker over then-No. 15 Michigan State. The Sun Devils opened at No. 23, two spots ahead of the Spartans, then promptly bombed out on the road against Group of Five opponent San Diego State and bombed out of the polls after just one week aloft. After Week 4 it was Texas A&M and Boston College who cut their stay short at one week. A week later it was Duke, California, and Texas Tech who all dropped out before the end of September after the briefest of appearances on the list.

A similar trend followed in 2017, when Notre Dame entered the polls after the opening weekend and dropped right back out the following week. UCLA stepped into the vacancy after starting 2-0 in Jim Mora’s final season; the Bruins lasted one week on the list before ceding way to an Oregon team they would beat later in the season. Oregon could not make it to October before losing their spot in the Top 25 in a 37-35 loss at Arizona State that began a streak of four losses in five.

Keep going back through historical poll data and you find such occurrences scattered throughout whichever season you choose to peruse. 2016 saw it happen to TCU — between Week 4 and Week 5, after they had already climbed in and fallen out of the Top 25 once before. In 2015, Mississippi State yo-yoed twice, between Weeks 1 and 2 and again between Weeks 4 and 5. They were joined by West Virginia the second time they toppled out.

And in the first year of the College Football Playoff, Virginia Tech upset eventual national champion Ohio State on the road and launched all the way to No. 17 in the AP Top 25. A week later, the Hokies suffered a loss against East Carolina and dropped all the way back out of the poll.

What are the odds of returning to the Top 25 after a yo-yo incident?

Sometimes this early promise papers over what eventually results in a season-long decline. Other times it is a minor blip before a team rebounds to consolidate poll position.

Going back through the history of this phenomenon since the advent of the College Football Playoff, we see that Virginia Tech never recovered. After the East Carolina loss sent the Hokies out of the polls, they went on to finish the regular season 6-6 and finish sixth in the seven-team ACC Coastal.

After yo-yoing in and out of the poll on two separate occasions in September 2015, Mississippi State actually earned a third chance at national prominence. The Bulldogs spent four weeks in the Top 25 in November, finally dropping back out for good after falling 38-27 against rival Ole Miss in an Egg Bowl featuring two ranked teams. West Virginia, on the other hand, lost three more games in a row after sustaining their first defeat and closed out the regular season 7-5.

TCU, unlike Mississippi State, never received a third chance after falling from the AP Top 25 twice over the course of September play. The Horned Frogs finished the regular season 6-6 and dropped the Liberty Bowl against Georgia to close out the year with a losing record.

By the end of 2017, Notre Dame closed out the season at No. 11 in the final AP Top 25. Neither UCLA nor Oregon managed to join the Fighting Irish in their recovery.

Among last year’s squads to yo-yo in and out of the Top 25, Florida ended the year at No. 8 while South Carolina came nowhere near the polls again. Texas A&M finished at No. 16, while neither Arizona State nor Boston College returned to the polls at any point for the rest of the year.

What should teams like USC and Maryland read into this information?

An early rise and fall in the first few weeks of the season is not necessarily a death sentence for a team’s chances of ending the season in a high position in the polls. Teams that climb up and drop right out have plenty of time to right the ship.

While climbing up into one of the four College Football Playoff positions might be too much to ask, a trip to a New Year’s Six bowl is still entirely possible for the Terrapins or the Trojans.

But note that this is qualified as an either/or statement, because history indicates that at best only one out of every two teams will actually manage to engineer the turnaround back into the polls in a given season. Either Helton is going to quiet the clock currently ticking on his USC tenure, or Locksley is going to turn the Terps into a spoiler in the Big Ten East.

The odds of both occurring simultaneously are slim to none.

So as we approach the final week of September in the 2019 college football season, there is no need to hit the panic button quite yet in Los Angeles or College Park. Southern California fans and Maryland fans would do well to take caution and wait to see what happens in next week’s key contests. The Trojans will get their shot to take the lead in the Pac-12 South race against a Utah team ranked in the top 15, and the Terrapins will try to take down a Penn State team also ranked among the 15 best in the country.

A loss for either team will quickly lead to the adjustment of their 2019 goals toward more modest hopes of locking in bowl eligibility. A win, though, opens up the possibility of climbing right back up into the Top 25 and contending for a New Year’s Six berth.