Mumme Poll results, week six

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.