Without further ado, here are the current rankings:
Rank Team Votes (top five) 1 Alabama 444 (443) 2 Florida 444 (441) 3 Texas 440 (400) 4 Virginia Tech 433 (350) 5 Southern Cal 399 (165) 6 Iowa 386 7 Boise State 377 8 Cincinnati 350 9 Miami 348 10 Ohio State 323 11 LSU 298 12 Oregon 271 13 TCU 264 14 Nebraska 113 15 Penn State 92 16 Oklahoma 63 17 Kansas 53 17 Georgia Tech 53 19 South Florida 51 20 South Carolina 37 21 Oklahoma State 16 22 Auburn 15 23 Notre Dame 10 24 BYU 9 24 Houston 9
COMMENTS
Take a freakin’ bow, people.
If you’ll indulge me, let me go back for a second to review what our mission statement is.
The Mumme Poll is an ongoing attempt… to construct a viable method to rank Division 1 college football teams without the bias and potential conflicts of interest that affect other polls, particularly the USA Today Coaches Poll.
In my humble opinion, based on the above results, we’re off to a great start.
The purpose behind the Mumme Poll isn’t that we’re necessarily trying to come up with different results from what you see in the other polls. Nor do we see this as an exercise in “predictive accuracy”, whatever in the hell that is. (Besides, polls are supposed to be reflective of schools’ bodies of work, not predictive – which is one reason why we don’t start the MP voting until week six is in the books.)
With our mousetrap, we’re simply out to catch credible poll rankings in a way that reduces at least the perception as well as the actuality of bias/conflict of interest, and to do so with a format that minimizes the effort that the coaches would have to engage in, in order that the likelihood of their participation in the poll vote would be much greater than what we perceive it to be at present.
What I see in that first set of rankings makes me think we’re definitely on the right track. Particularly since we’re doing it within the mechanism of a fan-based vote, rather than with so-called experts. And because we’re also doing it without the feedback that the BlogPoll utilizes as its way of addressing the bias/conflict issue – which works, but from a practical standpoint, couldn’t be carried over to the Coaches Poll.
So like I said, take a bow. And those of you who were worried about the weird votes on some of the dry run ballots can relax now.
Here are a few specific observations:
- The first thing that jumped out at me in the rankings is… well, the first thing. Alabama and Florida being in a virtual dead heat strikes me as (1) being a fair reflection of what the two schools have accomplished so far this season and (2) a good example of why preseason polls muck things up. In the Coaches Poll, ‘Bama has moved into second, but is still behind Florida because the Gators hold a 50-10 margin in first place votes. The AP still has the Tide ranked third, while the Harris Poll has Alabama and Texas tied for second. There’s only one reason for that.
- A total of 444 ballots were cast. My gut feeling was that a more than ten-fold increase in the number of voters this season would result in fewer ties and a more likely chance that a top 25 would come out of the vote. And that certainly looks to be the case. (In fact, there are another 15-20 teams that received votes outside of our top 25.)
- We banned two voters, one of whom was being a clown, the other of whom was trying to make a point about freedom of speech. We deleted one other ballot and put the voter on probation, because he failed to respond to our inquiry about some of his selections.
- Georgia, which had 339 school-affiliated voters participate this week, didn’t receive a single vote.
- Interestingly enough, voters affiliated with SEC schools had Florida and Alabama in a tie, with Florida at #1 on the tiebreaker.
- The highest ranked school that received no top five votes is Penn State. The lowest ranked school to receive a top five vote is South Carolina.
- An overwhelming number of voters compiled their ballots in less than 30 minutes. In fact, a substantial majority did it in less than fifteen. That’s much faster than last year.
You can comment below, or, if you’re registered, hie thee over to the MP site and do it there.
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UPDATE: Here are the BlogPoll results for week 6, if you interested in the comparison.
With Auburn and Georgia getting smoked on the road last Saturday, SEC victory chains are beginning to resemble Moebius strips. When you get down to it, though, it’s Alabama’s and Florida’s world. The rest of the conference is just living in it.
Get The Picture 