It is amazing how accurate most pre season polls turn out to be.
The easy part is always gauging the existing talent for the upcoming year, but then I realized the more important factor. The coach.
It the coach has a winning record over the years, his team will usually be ranked higher. If a coach has the opposite losing record, his team will be ranked lower.
It seems the coach is evaluated more than the talent. This makes sense for coaches who run a good program that allows players to progress to the level of play while on that coach's team.
Coaches who consistently play underclassmen over upperclassmen have a tendency to not have a team building program in place. I would think that a student of the coach's style of play would be more seasoned than the newcomer.
These points seem to make picking division leaders a lot easier than just by trying to gauge talent.
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