College football preview 2018: 10 unranked teams most likely to surprise

Here are 10 unranked teams who are going to be pleasant surprises for their fans and for the rest of college football in 2018.

I’ve read and written plenty of ‘surprise teams’ and ‘teams to watch’ articles and am a big fan of that concept from both viewpoints. ‘Unranked teams to surprise’, I came to realize, is a whole different ball of wax.

The unranked qualifier eliminates the 25 most widely known teams and 99.5 percent of the typical college football coverage. Nothing on the national championship, the four playoff teams or top conference contenders applies here. And ‘surprising’ as an unranked team by finishing the season still unranked might be possible but isn’t something I’d consider noteworthy, definitely not worth reading or writing about.

With the lack of ambiguity limiting both the field to start and the landing zone, this became basically analyzing teams No. 26-50 and figuring out teams might be good enough to finish the year in the No. 10-25 range.

I was skeptical about how many teams that could include but was betting well below 10, given the narrow limits. I looked at all the ranked teams in the final polls over the last three seasons to see how many started the year unranked. 10 was a surprisingly accurate number.

47 unranked teams finished the season with Top 25 rankings from 2013-2017. The range varied from eight-11 teams and the average over five seasons was 9.4. With that in mind, knowing the actual answer would very likely be right around 10 teams, I dug in.

Here are the 10 unranked teams who are going to surprise in 2018.