BlogPoll Week 5

Hurray, that's the poll hurray. If you're interested, you can see all the individual ballots here.

Big winner this week is Michigan State again. Funny that a point-a-minute win over lowly Illinois would cause pollsters to rocket the Spartans from #17 to #9, but given how the program historically hates success, I can see it. Minnesota (#16 from unranked), Wisconsin (#17 from unranked), and their crushing ground games make impressive BlogPoll debuts as well. Add in the fact that Michigan State also has a crushing ground game and that Michigan couldn't convert fourth and goal from the one and yes, this is essentially the most depressing paragraph ever for me.

Big losers are Michigan (gone), Louisville (hanging on by the skin of their teeth at #25), Georgia Tech, and Purdue.

Now on to the extracurriculars. First up are the teams which spur the most and least disagreement between voters as measured by standard deviation. Note that the standard deviation charts halt at #25 when looking for the lowest, otherwise teams that everyone agreed were terrible (say, Eastern Michigan) would all be at the top.

Cal's deviation is falling as doubters like me run out of teams to put in front of them and have to put them in the poll, but they're still #1. The two Big Ten debutants are also high up there.

Ballot math: First up are "Mr. Bold" and "Mr. Numb Existence." The former goes to the voter with the ballot most divergent from the poll at large. The number you see is the average difference between a person's opinion of a team and the poll's opinion.

Mr. Bold is... Warren St. John? Is this a publicity stunt? Er, upon looking at the ballot, probably not so much. WSJ's main fobiles are a staunch disbelief in Ohio State (my man!), who languish at #15 in his ballot, and LSU, who check it at #20. There's also the matter of Minnesota at #8, beloved 'Bama at #9, and Wisconsin at #11. WSJ is apparently a sucker for an authoritative ground game.

Mr. Numb Existence is the other Authorita-dispensing heavyweight currently deigning to vote, Football Outsiders. As you might expect, FO's ballot is really close to the poll at large.

Next we have the Coulter/Krugman Award and the Straight Bangin' Award, which are again different sides of the same coin. The CKA and SBA go to the blogs with the highest and lowest bias rating, respectively. Bias rating is calculated by subtracting the blogger's vote for his own team from the poll-wide average. A high number indicates you are shameless homer. A low number indicates that you suffer from an abusive relationship with your football team.

The CK Award has a new home after CU's disappointing loss to Miami: Penn State blogger 50 Yard Lion. It's hard to get on a guy with PSU at #19 given that they're 4-0 and the bottom of the poll is getting really creaky these days, but I saw that NW game... I'd enjoy it while I can. (Not that I have any business talking about how weak anyone's team looks.)

The Straight Bangin' Award can only go to teams that people vote for in quantity, so Straight Bangin' didn't win it this week and probably won't win it until next year's preseason poll. Instead, Georgia blogger Kyle On Football's dawg skepticism nets him the award. Also to be noted is that it's "opposite week" at the BlogPoll: the Enlightened Spartan is now underrating his team relative to the poll at large. Cats and dogs sleeping together! Mass hysteria!

Swing is essentially the total change in each ballot from last week to this week (obviously voters who didn't submit a ballot last week are not included). A high number means you are easily distracted by shiny things. A low number means that you're damn sure you're right no matter what reality says.

Mr. Manic-Depressive is Badger blogger Bruce Ciskie, probably due in no small part to an oversight from last week when he didn't include MSU at all. This week they're #11, a meteoric rise that's paralleled the BlogPoll's. Also showing up for the first time is Alabama. Bruce also severely overrated Louisville and (sigh) Michigan, so he had to hammer them 17 spots each when they lost.

Mr. Stubborn is... uh... probably not actionBERG, since his ballot shows way more wiggle than the 16 total spots the algorithm calculated. Something's broken here. Sorry kids.

FIN!