Hurray, that's the poll hurray. If you're interested, you can see all the individual ballots here.
The big story this week is 'Bama's vault into the top ten after doing something radioactive to Florida on Saturday. 'Bama's ascendancy proves that the key to winning college football games is having your bigshot mainstream media alums be nice to bloggers--note that Skip Bayless and his beloved Sooners are both struggling to explain... well, anything. (And blogging phoenix SMQB... Oklahoma? Really?)
We have some consensus at the top, where the three lowest-deviation teams all reside (this is unsurprising due to math), but it's cats in a bag once you get past Team Albuquerque at #3.
Welcome back to Michigan (left the poll last week), Auburn (left after week 1), and Penn State (left sometime after the Nixon Administration). This year's trend appears to be Big Ten whack-a-mole wherein whoever pops their head up and looks like a decent team immediately gets throttled shamefully, so watch out Wisconsin and Penn State.
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.
The deviation makes a lot of sense this week: tops is played no-one-really (unless you count Kansas--iffy) Texas Tech, followed by are-they-for-real Penn State and what-do-I-do-with-these-guys Arizona State.
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 boifromtroy, who has ND at #5 (plausible, but I think what we're finding out is that ND's schedule features a sampler plate of the most overrated teams in the country: Michigan, Pitt, Purdue), Cal at #7, Florida State and Miami down a ways at #15 and #16, and Rutgers at #24... Rutgers? That's not exactly Idaho... but if BFT wants to convince me that he'd bet on the Scarlet Knights versus #25 Penn State I'm listening. One thing: 3-2 Michigan at #18 and 5-0, Michigan-beating Wisconsin at #19 seems specifically designed to send Bruce Ciskie into a cheese-destroying rage.
Mr. Numb Existence is Bruins Nation, even though they're one of five voters with Texas #1. The metric doesn't weight top slots heaviest--should it? Input desired.
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 goes to Georgia Tech bloggers Golden Tornado, but I think this more on us than on him. Tech gets nuked by Virginia Tech and the Special Teams Spectacular, has an off week, we all neglect to consider that the Jackets beat Auburn pretty handily earlier in the year, and just shove the Tigers up because we forgot all about week one. As a result, GT's GT ranking of #18 nets it the top spot in this category because the rest of us screwed up.
The Straight Bangin' Award goes to... er, yeah. Straight Bangin', who left Michigan out of his poll after the MSU victory. It's not unreasonable to have a 3-2 team with two MAC wins out of the poll and I had 'em at #24 (and finished #5 in the increasingly tight confines of these categories) so I won't bash him too hard.
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 Bruins Nation again, largely because they weren't 'Bama believers and had to run them way up the line from #20, liked Penn State enough to debut them at #16, and punished MSU heavily for their loss.
Mr. Stubborn is... still broken. Apologies. Blogpoll related work is going into a project that needs to be up and running by November (3... 2... 1... duh!).
Wait! Before you go, there are nefarious plans in the works. The blogpoll is a community, and what's a community unless you can't hand out provincial awards to each other? The night of the Rose Bowl will also be the night another Mythical National Championship gets handed out, but this one will go to one of our foot-blog brethren. Awards will be handed out. However, other than a few obvious categories (Best Blog, Best Contribution To The Lingo, Best Recurring Feature, Best Writer, etc...) there's a big empty spot. Please leave suggestions for various accomplishments we can celebrate at the end of a productive year in our little Interniche.
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