BlogPoll Week 13

(note: due to a consistent morning time drain on Wednesday, you can expect the poll at about noon going forward.)

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

Fallers: Miami, Michigan, and Alabama all took the pipe, as did last week's poll debutant South Carolina.

Risers: Georgia Tech's schizophrenic year continues with a win over then #3 Miami and boosts them from out of the poll up to #19. Also of note is Ohio State (finally) hurdling Notre Dame after a fairly throttling victory over Michigan--yes, despite the whole come from behind thing. Fresno State going toe-to-toe with USC probably hurt Notre Dame more than Ohio State's win, though. Speaking of Fresno, they didn't rise after that narrow loss but nor did they drop, remaining static at #15.

Outrage!!! I still think the mid-majors get too much credit for not losing to meh teams.

Wack Ballot Watchdog: As discussed below, Kyle King freakin' hates UCLA. Sporting Fools, who I hasten to point out is not a Michigan fan, 50YL, has Ohio State #5 and Penn State #6 despite the head to head and the fewer losses, etc. Boi From Troy is still voting for Cal and is singlehandedly fighting a private war against East Coast Bias(!).

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.

No, we still don't know what to do with Texas Tech. Voters have the Red Raiders anywhere from #15 to #25 and no particularl slot got more than six votes. This would all be very clear if they had played, say, Wisconsin and Virginia OOC.

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 Kyle King, AKA The Mayor (of the non-city of Georgia). This appears to be one of those weeks where the winner of this category has a lot of slightly strange things in the ballot but few large differences--his #3 is VT, Auburn is #6, Ga Tech is a little high at #14, etc. Two things do leap out: Fresno State at #10, up six from last week, nestled snugly in front of #11 Notre Dame, and UCLA way, way down the ballot at #21. I guess I can see UCLA's awful run defense, series of close calls against bad teams, and absolute demolition at the hands of Arizona causing you to knock a one-loss team down a ways, but that's a ginormous outlier: no one else has the Bruins worse than #16. Bad mayor!

Mr. Numb Existence ParadigmBlog, and yes, I do find it amusing that the top two blogs in this category are both Michigan fans.

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 the second consecutive week, this time for having WVU #7. Interestingly, Kyle King is now showing up on this half of the bias list after spending quite a bit of time early in the year on the Straight Bangin' list.

The Straight Bangin' Award is now the property of Bruce Ciskie, who I believe is a repeat winner. Bruce totally omits Wisconsin from his ballot. He's been steadfast all year in his belief that the Badgers are overrated and his ballots reflects that.

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 is actionBERG, who radically revamped his ballot after getting some heat for it in this space. The Texas teams take steps back to more reasonable slots in the poll (TCU down six to #16, UTEP down to #25), a lot of teams that were seemingly way underranked made major steps forward (Ohio State up 5, ND up 4, etc. He's probably the only voter to seriously punish Fresno, though, dropping them from #11 to #20. It's not a Numb Existence ballot, but it's not an auto-Bold one any longer, a nice middle ground.

Mr. Stubborn is Rob in Madtown, who hardly moved anyone at all: Miami dropped four, Michigan dropped a few, a few teams went out. 'Bama dropped one spot.