The Athletic has a great piece ($) analyzing the history of the preseason AP poll and looking at how accurate it winds up being. Some fun tidbits:

- Since the preseason poll started in 1950, only one single time has the preseason 1 and 2 finished in that order.  So it won't be Clemson and Bama in the top two spots in December. (This is obviously is less important than it was in the BCS days, as it doesn't really matter if one of them slips to 3 or 4)

- In each of the past 4 years, there has been at least one team from outside the preseason top 10 to crack the final top 4.

- At least one of the top 10 will finish unranked, and an average of two unranked teams will finish in the top 10

- An average of three ranked teams will finish with sub-.500 records