We’re back, baby!

Peyton and I with the 2022 Mumme Poll, that is.  It’s Week 6 and it’s time to get started.

I’m just gonna outsource the rules and format from myself.

Here’s a reminder of what few rules there are in casting ballots:

• Mumme Poll ranking is determined by approval voting.  You don’t submit a ballot ranking the teams in some subjective order.  You do not designate a particular team as your choice for number one, unless, of course, you limit your ballot to one team.  You simply list the number of teams you think are worthy of consideration and teams are ranked on the basis of the total number of ballots on which they appear in a given week.
• There are no restrictions on the number of teams you choose to place on your ballot.  If you want to choose a top 25 every week, be my guest (just realize we won’t pay any attention to your order).  If you want to select a potential playoff field of eight or four teams, that’s fine, too.  If you think Alabama and Georgia are college football’s shiznit, buddy, have at it.
• Don’t try to game the process.  Don’t submit more than one ballot a week.  Do not list a particular school more than once on a given ballot.  Don’t list your favorite team along with the 23 worst teams in college football.  We do toss questionable votes.

For any newbies out there reading this, it may seem strange and against all your natural instincts as a way to rank college football teams, but trust us, approval voting works.  Plus, the real beauty of this is that you won’t have to spend any time weighing the difference between the nineteenth-best and twentieth-best teams in the country.  By the time you reach season’s end, barring a return to 2007-like chaos, you’ll probably be able to assemble your ballot in less than a couple of minutes.  It doesn’t get much easier than that.  (We don’t have to rent a conference room in Texas and fly all the voters out there each week, either.)

As for the logistics regarding voting each week, here’s how it works:

• Starting this weekend, I will put up a post at GTP every Sunday morning with a link to the week’s ballot.
• The ballot [is arranged by conference and you simply check a box if you want to cast a vote for a particular team]. Whatever number of teams you include will be all that counts.  Also, you’ll need to answer the question at the end of the ballot for security purposes.  Give us a valid email address where indicated and you’re good to go.
• You have two days to vote.  We’ll chew on our individual ballots in a Tuesday post and the poll results will be posted every Wednesday.

Easy peasy, amirite? As Andy Staples once told me, “I always tell people that if they don’t like the way I vote, they can rank teams how they please. Thanks to you, they can.”