BlogPoll Week Six

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

Ohio State, #1 everywhere else, is also #1 in the BlogPoll but its margin is much smaller; South Florida takes 26 first place votes to OSU's 35. LSU maintains five, and Arizona State(?!) picks up one.

Elsewhere, we have a very AP moment as we drop Cal well behind Oregon after the Bears' loss to Oregon State, Hawaii continues its undeserved march up the ranks after an overtime victory over San Jose State, and USC, oddly, continues its plummet after a win, albeit an ugly, close one over Arizona.

Michigan -- gulp -- returns at #25.

Wack Ballot Watchdog:

• The LSU five: MGoBlog, Hey Jenny Slater, SMQB, Bruce Ciskie, and Cal Golden Blogs all stick with LSU, Ciskie after I berated him over IM for 45 minutes. The Arizona State outlier is Boi From Troy. More on him later.
• The poll's most negative LSU voter, Corn Nation, places them twelfth, a full six spots behind a team, South Carolina, LSU beat by 12, and two spots behind Virginia Tech, who they beat by 41.
• I said anyone who put Hawaii in the top ten should be horsewhipped; we have two horsewhipees. The very slightly less egregious is Eagle In Atlanta, ranking Hawaii #6. Meanwhile...
• My Opinion On Sports has Hawaii #3, then compounds this by putting Virginia Tech #2. An atrocious, unjustifiable ballot in so many ways: LSU again well behind two teams it beat, Hawaii #3 ahead of, well... nearly everyone.
• Boi From Troy ranks USF #14; Frank McGrath puts them #12.
• BFT also has Oregon #2, Michigan #12, USC #6, and a bunch of other random stuff that makes little sense, especially when the deltas are taken into account.
• EDSBS leaps Cincinnati up seven spots after a loss; when asked about this Orson said "I'M FORTY! I'M A MAN! PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS AN ERROR IN YOUR TONGUE-LASHING SECTION."

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.

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.


This week's Mr. Bold is, as you might imagine, Boi From Troy. Second: MOOS. Hang your heads in shame, for your ballots harm us all.


Last week:

Mr. Numb Existence goes to Double Extra Point (ballot), which wins this award so often it's freaky. Other things DEP likes: white bread, vanilla ice cream, and the Ford Taurus. If that makes them sound racist, that's not the intent. Boring is what we were looking for. Boring.

Yeah, they won it again this week. Are they trying for this? Do they look at chocolate ice cream, shudder, and then say "I'll stick with vanilla, thanks". (Again, we're looking for "boring".) It seems pretty easy to try for a weird ballot -- just stick Hawaii in the top ten and diss LSU -- but consistently coming down with the least weird ballot is some kind of parlor trick.


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 did not inflict pain this week because its winner, Dan Shanoff and Florida, had a bye. This week Boi From Troy wrests the award away from Dan -- not on the list at all -- right before USC plays... uh... Notre Dame. #&*$! There isn't a dire annoying-pundit-based college football poll award on the planet that can propel Notre Dame to victory against USC. Maybe Florida, squaring off with dangerous Kentucky, will go down.

(Note: it's a good thing BFT used his Trojan-biased random number generator this week, else the MZone would have won this and I would have to kill them.)


Last week:

The winner is Jonathan Tu, who one-ups Saurian Sagacity by leaving USC completely out of his poll. Saurian Sagacity's own total omission of Florida from their ballot can't compare; they narrowly finish second. I believe Tu's winning margin of -12.46 is the highest score ever recorded in this category.

Same 1-2, though both have started including their teams in their ballots, bringing down the winning margins considerably.

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 goes to Tomahawk Nation... geez, guys. Cal down 14, VT up 18(!!!), Oregon up 8, WVU up 7... maybe they have long-term memory issues.



MOOS is Mr. Stubborn.