BlogPoll Week 12

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

Fallers: Many in an upset-filled weekend in college football. Florida took the most severe hit after losing to poll debutant South Carolina and that guy who looks somewhat familiar. Florida State's dismal stretch has dropped them all the way to #21 with Florida and Miami upcoming. Both Georgia and Alabama dropped narrow games against ranked SEC foes and dropped four spots. Bama's chart is remarkably coherent now.

Risers: The Old Ball Coach has new tricks at South Carolina and makes an impressive debut at #19. Pitt Sports Blather dropped them in at #12(!). The teams immediately in front of the other USC mostly benefited from the mass destruction in the middle of the poll: Fresno State, TCU, Michigan, and Louisville all experienced nice gains.

Outrage!!! Texas Tech is still ranked? Is UTEP really better than the major conference teams behind it? Very little this week, though--everything seems reasonable as the teams begin to dictate our ballots in great detail.

Wack Ballot Watchdog: Not much this week. See below.

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.

Voters are clearly undecided on what exactly to do with a team that has one loss by a billion points to a crappy team and several other hair-raising escapes, as UCLA is the new King of Variance.

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 actionBERG again, no doubt due to his tendency to rank any Texas team with a good record against crappy competition way, way high: TCU is #10, UTEP #13, and Texas Tech is #19. In other wackiness, WVU is #9, Ohio State #14, and Notre Dame #16.

Mr. Numb Existence is the DJL Zone. Everything on his ballot is relentlessly reasonable, as one might expect.

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 the WV Law Dog for ranking the Mountaineers #9, though he's not even the voter most bullish on them. My Opinion On Sports has them #7.

The Straight Bangin' Award has returned home, sort of. It's the same guy at new digs, as Joey takes his namesake award, though the margin this week is fairly low: Michigan checks in at #20. In front of Rutgers, even!

Swing is 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 are the GT guys at Golden Tornado, who were forced to freak out by recent events as they were amongst the heavy Auburn doubters. The Tigers shoot from #24 to #10. They also excised former #14 Texas Tech entirely and punished Wisconsin and Florida heavily for their losses.

Mr. Stubborn is TrojanWire... and this is a really weird ballot. LSU drops three places for beating Alabama. Va Tech moves up four for doing nothing in particular. Florida and Florida State go nowhere. Cal moves up 5 for getting waxed by USC. What is the deal?