Danwillhor

March 10th, 2013 at 12:18 AM ^

I hear TA&M or Aggie and IMMEDIATELY think of prevailandride.blogspot.com

Dude ate some crow based on his pre-season MS Paint post but it was and is still funny. Week 11 post killed it and still cracks me up while he basically predicted (who couldn't, lol) the NCG and outcome the post after both Oregon ans KSU lost.

Never disliked A&M but their fans in the vote were almost uniformly assholes. Very few "it's just a stupid cover, guys" and 99% "hahaha butthurt Michigan fans!1!!1" , "denard sux" and "what has Michigan done in the last 20 years?!?" (as if a good year, Heisman winner and beating a worn down Bama fresh off a grinder vs LSU = We've never been down) fans. Not that our fans didn't have some bad seeds but it was FAR less toxic and much more simply "GO BLUE!" or "Go Denard!" type stuff before, during and after the blatant cheating outcries.

I can say I now think much less of their fanbase than I used to. I never disliked A&M or their fans but maybe it's because I'd never interacted with a fan or really seen their team do much in my life. As far as Texas teams go, I'd now put them below SMU and North Texas on my like list. Yet, that's just me as it's not like we can attribute all of the world's agriculture and agriculture technology/advancement to one A&M school in Texas.

Still, I laughed at your comment. haha

BlueVball8

March 9th, 2013 at 6:02 PM ^

We were up 14k votes and in one day that was eliminated. We also still ended up winning the total vote. However, I wouldn't be all that suprised if they did something like a regional release or something like that as a compromise. That or they have a completely subjective and arbitrary/ridiculous way of weeding through close to almost 400k votes to determine who's realy and who's not.

mgoterp

March 9th, 2013 at 7:51 PM ^

i dont think ea cares who is on the cover. they know that they will sell roughly the same amount of games no matter who is on the cover. they put peyton hillis on the cover of madden a couple of years ago, and if they wanted to put someone who was marketable he would not have been on it.

kakusei

March 9th, 2013 at 8:02 PM ^

ncaa football sales are nowhere near the sales of madden.  marketing is much more important for the ncaa football franchise than for madden. i am almost positive they are going to think long and hard about who is on the cover and what impact that may have on sales.

goblue20111

March 10th, 2013 at 1:59 PM ^

Personally, I have a rule where I don't buy sports games each year. It's just waste of money since not much changes from year to year. This is the year to skip NCAA for me. However, if Denard is on the cover I'd pick it up just to have something cool like that. Denard was a bright spot on some very dark years of Michigan football. I'd think you'd see a lot of people buying it just to have it as memrobilia.

evenyoubrutus

March 9th, 2013 at 6:21 PM ^

I have no idea how true it is that EA is putting this much effort into making sure only "real" votes are being counted but I have to really wonder if several staff members working over time combing through thousands of votes is really cost effective here. Yes, the Facebook vote is nothing more than an interest generating promo but this has gone a little too far from a business perspective.  It is glaringly obvious which player would sell more games.  And one fanbase is guaranteed to be pissed off anyway, so why would you piss off the biggest one in the country?

MGoBender

March 9th, 2013 at 8:18 PM ^

...counted but I have to really wonder if several staff members working over time combing through thousands of votes is really cost effective here.

It would take very, very little man hours.  This is the internet/computers.  Just about any coder has write a script that sorts the votes according to person/page/email address/male/female/left-handedness/whateva.

It might take an hour to write that code. Probably much less for someone who knows the Facebook API well.  It would literally take milliseconds to sort that data once the program is written.

Software baby.  Sorting those votes is no issue at all.

SituationSoap

March 9th, 2013 at 8:40 PM ^

While you're right, you're overselling it a bit. Working with the Facebook API isn't a perfect situation (trust me, I've done it, it's not the world's prettiest API), and that's assuming Facebook provides endpoints where you can access a voting record. Otherwise, you're SOL.

 

With that said, assuming the API functionality exists, I would expect something more like the better part of an afternoon, and it would probably take a couple minutes to return, not milliseconds. You need to make a round trip to Facebook's server for each vote, possibly multiples, and each one of those visits is going to take a few dozen milliseconds at least.

MGoBender

March 9th, 2013 at 10:20 PM ^

Haven't worked with the FB API in many years, so I'll take your word for it.  I was admittedly being a little hyperbolic with how quickly a script could be wrote, though I would have thought FB would be able to provide some simple analytics that could be accessed easily.

If you're correct that a script would ahve to go back and forth with the server, then yeah your estimate is probably better.

Point remains, I don't think it is a difficult task to analyze these votes.

evenyoubrutus

March 9th, 2013 at 8:56 PM ^

I am not a software engineer or anything but this was the first thing I had thought, that a simple program (that a B- student could probably design) should be able to do the trick. So if that's all that it takes then why the ridiculously long delay in announcing the results?

wolfman81

March 9th, 2013 at 11:46 PM ^

Speaking as someone who does some data mining, you should think that it would take them about an hour to figure out as long as Facebook isn't totally stupid.

Seriously, if the vote came from a community account (or however the SECers were subverting the system), you just pitch it.  If it came from a real person, you keep it.  It isn't a democracy, they aren't worried about infringing on people's rights.

jdib

March 9th, 2013 at 6:19 PM ^

if you have the little "So and So voted for NCAA Cover vote" linked to the direct vote on your facebook profile you can see the vote still climbing and the radio buttons next to their names still work.  Don't know if EA is sifting through votes or it's unintended but you can see Denard and Swope's votes keep climbing.  

 

 

https://www.facebook.com/questions/10151454940472280/

 

 

Stephen Y

March 9th, 2013 at 6:44 PM ^

Around midnight last night the voting was something like Denard 198k, Swope 193k

Around 4:00 AM it was something like Denard 195k, Swope 188k

Since this morning, it's been close to Denard 199k, Swope 191k

 

So yeah something is happening with the votes...

Also, I saw someone from U of Texas say he just voted Denard around 4:30 PM today.  He finished his comment with, "Hook Em."  Not sure how he voted if the polling is supposedly closed.

 

This is what the Hardy Boys must feel like?

MaizeMN

March 9th, 2013 at 6:18 PM ^

Shoelace: "Kids would go for his shoes on tackles, and he'd come up to the huddle in just socks. His coach couldn't stand it at first and neither could his parents. They'd tie wristbands around his shoes. When that didn't work, they tried athletic tape. They even rolled his socks over his shoes. He was a marvel, and he wasn't even finished with the sixth grade."[1] 

... and a degree from MICHIGAN.

Yeah, Denard won.

 

Rank Player Year Opponent Passing yards[158] Rushing yards[158] Total offense
1 Denard Robinson 2010 Notre Dame 244 258 502
2 Denard Robinson 2010 Indiana 277 217 494
3 Denard Robinson 2011 Northwestern 337 117 454
4 Denard Robinson 2011 Notre Dame 338 108 446
5 Denard Robinson 2012 Air Force 208 218 426
6 Denard Robinson 2012 UMass 291 106 397
7 Denard Robinson 2010 Connecticut 186 197 383
8 Denard Robinson 2010 Penn State 190 191 381
9 John Navarre 2003 Iowa 389 (21)[n 1] 368
10

Denard Robinson

2010 Illinois 305 62 367

 MilliA degree from Michigan and legions of ans.LLegions

 

Michigan Arrogance

March 9th, 2013 at 6:20 PM ^

What you guys don't know is that this was just the "preliminary" rounds.

 

Denard won, but all it gets him is a spot in the true 256-player field. The actual contest ends in March 2026