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Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Previously: Preseason; Week 2; Week 3; Week 4; Week 5; Week 6; Week 7; Week 8; Week 9; Week 10; Week 11.

Note: if you see last week's poll it's a cache thing, I think. Refresh should cure it.

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

Blood on the dance floor! And we have people bailing from Ohio State in the face of the upcoming Football Armageddon. If I find that any Michigan voters have tempted fate the beatin' stick is coming out. Checking... checking... nope. Our dissenters are a distinguished group:

Sports Frog IS tempting fate despite their Central Michigan affiliation, as our voter from over there is also a Michigan fan. If we lose... ooooh!

Note the extremely tight race for spots 3, 4, and 5, then the dropoff to Rutgers and a second drop to ND.

Risers: Well, damn near everyone. Rutgers is the big winner, shooting all the way up to sixth, past Notre Dame but behind Arkansas. USC also rockets up mostly by virtue of others losing, though they did hop Florida after their narrow escape versus South Carolina. Farther down the big winners were Wisconsin (up four) and Wake (up five after killing Jeff Bowden).

Fallers: Louisville drops six, and if you'd ever like evidence of BlogPoll superiority there is this: we managed to keep a one-loss Louisville team in front of a one-loss West Virginia team it beat comfortably a mere two weeks ago.

The rest of the carnage: Tennessee down seven, Auburn down eight, Texas down eight, Cal down a whopping ten.

Wack Ballot Watchdog: This is the point where I crow about killing Auburn last week. Okay. Now we're done before anyone can remind me Auburn was my preseason #1.

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.

Mr. Bold is (are?) Men of the Scarlet and Grey, who have Boise State #4. Uh... okay!

Mr. Numb Existence is Iowa State blogger Cross Cyed. Hire Jim Harbaugh. He's sweet.





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 BC blogger Eagle In Atlanta takes it this week for ranking BC #15 while the poll slots them 19th. Given the mess after, oh... #8, this could very well be massively reasonable.

Straight Bangin' Award basically doesn't exist this week. The A&M and Michigan bloggers are off by minute amounts and Dan Shanoff wins with a whopping 0.38 deviation. No one still left in the poll hates their team irrationally. (Or, as we saw with Georgia bloggers early in the year, very, very rationally.)




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 also Eagle in Atlanta -- fun ballot this week, I guess. Reasons:
  • Dropping former #9 Cal entirely. Mistake? Omission? Ditto for #15 Tennessee, gonzo after losing heavily to Arkansas.
  • Hammering Boise State -- down nine -- for their highwire escape from SJSU.
  • Wisconsin up nine for no discernible reason.
  • Rutgers up to #3. Wake up to #6 (ACC POWAH!)


Mr. Stubborn is Falcon Nation, and no kidding. I guess I can see an argument for only moving Texas down a couple slots because their loss to Kansas State was a fluke-riddled, crazy game played largely without the services of Colt McCoy, but Auburn down only two to #6 after losing heavily and dismally to previously toothless Georgia? Auburn's leading receiver was Tra Battle, who does not play for Auburn.


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