MGoBlog Member Top 25

Submitted by swarwick33 on
After being curious about what actual college football viewers, as opposed to sports writers, though the Top 25 would be I had an idea to tap into one of the most knowledgeable fan bases in the country, ours.  Thus I present the first Members MGoBlog Poll.  First of all I want this to be known....THIS IS OPEN TO EVERYONE ON THE SITE!!!  Do not feel as if you need to have a certain amount of points to do it.  I only ask for a few things.

Oh real quick...Give a big positive point bang to Bleedin9Blue.  He was AWESOME with the sheet.  This would not be possible without him.  So mad love to you sir!!!

Thank you as well to all of those who voted...great first week, way to help me get this off the ground.  I am going to lock you in to the poll so you have a spot every week.

1) Do not vote until Sunday.  Right now we can only accommodate so many people on the ballot (I believe that it is around 140), so please do not waste a vote by voting before all the games have been played.

2) Leave the bias out of it.  I actually believe Michigan could be put in the Top 15, but not #1 Overall. 

3) I promise not to change your votes, unless you are ranking teams in a way that is just crazy.  It is hard to monitor over 100 people, so help me out with this.

4) You do not have to put your name on there, but it would be cool if you did so that I know who has been voting.  I appreciate those that do and would like to give people a shout out if they have been doing really well.

5) Do not kill each other if you do not agree with the rankings.  There will hopefully be enough people to balance out the few really high/ really low ranked teams.

6) Have fun with this.  I think that our poll is a more true example of what is going on in the world of college football, because we can leave the pre-season stuff out of it.  Vote based on WHO HAS THE BEST RESUME SO FAR.  Do not try to predict the future.

OK...For our first poll we had almost 20 voters.  A team ranked 1st got 25 points, a team ranked 25th got 1 point.  We are working on a way to auto-compare it with the AP and Coaches' Poll, but for the first week I will just write some notes to do the analysis.  So without further ado...the first annual MGoBlog Members Blog Poll


 Member's Poll
Coaches Rank AP Rank

Team Points

1 Alabama 391 3 3
2 Florida 383 2 2
3 Texas 376 1 1
4 Virginia Tech. 335 6 6
5 Boise State 322 5 5
6 Cincinnati 299 11 10
7 LSU 294 4 4
8 Iowa 264 17 13
9 Oklahoma 257 8 8
10 USC 253 7 7
11 Houston 252 15 12
12 Ohio State 231 9 9
13 TCU 223 10 11
14 Oklahoma State 167 12 14
15 Miami 163 21 17
16 Penn State 161 13 15
17 Oregon 153 25 16
18 Georgia 121 14 19
19 Michigan 105 20 22
20 Kansas 93 16 18
21 Brigham Young 72 21 20
22 California 52 19 24
23 Nebraska 48 24 23
24 Georgia Tech. 42 NR 25
25 Missouri 35 23 NR

Some observations.  This week we seem to have most of the same teams as the experts, but it a different order.  I think that this will eventually change, and will lead to some better analysis.

LOVE 'EM (Teams we have ranked substantially higher)
Alabama
Cincinnati
Iowa
Miami (FL)

HATE "EM (Teams we have ranked substantially lower)
LSU
USC
Ohio State
Penn State

ON THE BRINK (Teams 26-30)
Auburn
UCLA
South Florida
South Carolina
Wisconsin

HEAD SCRATCHIER (Team where people had no idea where to rank them)
Oklahoma- The Sooners were ranked as high as 5 and were left off of one ballot entirely.
Others- Kansas, TCU and Miami

LINK

Here is your link to participate.  You can go there now to check out the ballot.  PLEASE DO NOT CHANGE THE FORMULAS  IN THE TAB MARKED CHARTS, ONLY ENTER THINGS INTO THE VOTE SHEET.  If you are sure that you are going to vote, you can fill your name in for the information...again just please do not vote until Sunday and do not put in your information if you are not sure if you are going to vote at all.  Copy and paste the link below into your browser, and we will have this up and posted on Tuesday of next week.  Thanks again to those of you who voted this week.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AmMe19eG6tLTdHVQOXdWYzlyVHJENTJ…




Top 25
Alabama
Coaches' Poll
AP Poll
Member Vote

Comments

formerlyanonymous

September 30th, 2009 at 7:30 PM ^

I'd be interested to see the BlogPoll numbers along side the Coaches/AP/Harris polls. Just out of curiosity. Also, if you use [th] [/th] instead of [td] [/td] (with the proper greater than/less than characters), you can make title headers. See Headings In A Table. That would make your tables prettier. And I'm all about html tables that are prettier.

Joined: 06/30/2008

MGoPoints: 38964

iloveyellow

September 30th, 2009 at 7:43 PM ^

Clearly, the problem with the "formal" polls is the sense of obligation and entitlement the coaches and media have with regard to their votes; they are forced to or choose to adhere to a philosophy that is quite conservative and lazy in nature. With the blogpoll becoming something of an institution, and with its respect growing and eminence reaching more and more people, I'm not completely convinced that it won't turn into the evil it was meant to combat. I don't know if any poll thus designed and operated won't turn into something like that eventually, but the more people we can get voting whose opinions are not rooted in inane and antiquated structures, are not biased towards the past, and have real enthusiasm for participating in the poll, the better off the college football community will be.

Joined: 08/11/2009

MGoPoints: 452

PurpleStuff

September 30th, 2009 at 7:49 PM ^

I just read the title and thought this would be a ranking of Mgoblog members. Can't believe I wasted the last half hour planning my campaign. A ranking of college football teams we can all vote on is nice too though.

Joined: 04/21/2009

MGoPoints: 15969

Bleedin9Blue

September 30th, 2009 at 10:13 PM ^

Hey ya'all, glad to see that this got such a good reaction. I've read the above comments and I agree that this needs to be expanded. Unfortunately, when I made the poll, I didn't know about Google's precise limits on spreadsheet sizes, I thought it would be larger. What I might end up doing is just using Google spreadsheets to have people enter their votes, then I can take the data and use an Excel spreadsheet to do all the calculations automatically. As for the comparisons, I actually was working very hard on that for several hours that I should've been using to apply to jobs (hey, if anyone wants to hire a chemical engineer, I've got 2 degrees and am a hard worker... when I'm not working on making random football polls). I wanted to do what Brian does with the Blogpoll except instead of mostly comparing week x to week x-1 for individuals ballots and week x ballots to week x Blogpoll results, I wanted to compare all the ballots to all the polls. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out exactly how to do it fairly. For example, say I didn't rank Georgia Tech. in my poll but GT is ranked 24 in the Reader poll, what do I do? I assumed that everything was based on simply subtracting the ranking assigned to a team by a particular voter from where that team was actually ranked in the top 25 and then doing some comparisons. But, then the problem is what do I subtract when a ranked team is unranked on a ballot. I thought about doing the comparisons using ballot assigned points instead of ranks. Thus, ranked 25 teams would be worth 1 point on a ballot while rank 24 teams would be worth 2, etc. I could then just assume that all unranked teams are worth 0 points. Thus, in the GT situation presented above, the subtraction would be: Reader Poll points - Ballot points = 2 - 0 = 2. Then I could do comparisons using that. The problem there is that that assumes that all teams 26-120 are essentially even in the eyes of the voters. Obviously that's not true. If anyone was actually able to understand the problem that I described and has a solution for it, either put it in the comments or email me (the email that I'm using for this project is just my username with @gmail.com after it). I'm also willing to take other suggestions for improvements to this. I did start trying to figure out who was the most divergent from the poll. I'll keep expanding it. I think that next week's poll will go up on Saturday evening and will probably just be used by me as a place for people to vote in a predictable manner so that I can take the data and manipulate it in Excel. Again, send all suggestions to me via commenting here or sending me an email. Thanks for the appreciation, and if you really want to show your appreciation for this then just upvote me (pathetically enough, my self-esteem is at least partially linked to my MGoPoints and thus the more I get the happier I am).

Joined: 06/30/2008

MGoPoints: 2172

iloveyellow

October 1st, 2009 at 12:56 AM ^

I suppose you could just use the points accrued as the means of comparison instead of ranking, which is a secondary stat anyway. I'm sure there will be quite a few teams in the "others receiving votes" category, in which case there would be a buffer between the almost good teams and the rest of the mass abyss, especially when there is a fair number of voters whose polls will not include/exclude the same teams. Or you could make the number of teams in the poll flexible to reflect how the season is actually progressing. 25 is a pretty arbitrary number... make the cutoff a percentage of 4% or something.

Joined: 08/11/2009

MGoPoints: 452

MaizeNBlu628

September 30th, 2009 at 10:58 PM ^

should we just bookmark the page? any chance you can make/send out a mass email to everyone signed up to remind us to vote like every monday morning with the link? not necessary but thought it'd be nice...great job btw, thanks for doing this!

Joined: 08/21/2009

MGoPoints: 2786