MGoBlog Member Top 25
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
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…
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…
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.
September 30th, 2009 at 7:43 PM ^
Good Call On the Table!!
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.
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.
September 30th, 2009 at 7:50 PM ^
Hey lets see how it goes, I put my name in the spreadsheet in the first available spot and will vote on Sunday. Looking forward to it.
Go Blue!
September 30th, 2009 at 8:16 PM ^
140 participants is not enough ... we need to overcome this barrier.
September 30th, 2009 at 8:28 PM ^
We are working on this...I wanted to make sure we filled up the 140 first, but yeah it is going to have to be expanded in a week or 2.
September 30th, 2009 at 8:54 PM ^
Where do/would a person submit their ballot?
September 30th, 2009 at 10:40 PM ^
Just paste that link and edit the document(it's a google document).
September 30th, 2009 at 9:22 PM ^
Oklahoma wins: Tulsa, Idaho State (inspiring, I think not)
Oklahoma loss: BYU at a favorable neutral site. And Florida State demonstrated that BYU isn't that great a team pretty well. Oklahoma has plenty of chances to impress (http://espn.go.com/ncf/clubhouse?teamId=201 look at their schedule) however.
October 1st, 2009 at 6:52 AM ^
I had them way down in my poll, like 24th. I was not trying to call you out, just staying that Oklahoma was a really tough team to place in the polls this week
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).
September 30th, 2009 at 11:26 PM ^
can we have it like in the AP/Coaches polls where the number of first place votes for a team is in parenthesis next to the school? i kinda just like to see how many voters had each team ranked as 1.
October 1st, 2009 at 8:19 AM ^
Yes, I can do that.
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.
October 1st, 2009 at 8:21 AM ^
Maybe it would work to do the delta using Total points/# of ballots - points assigned to team on single ballot.
Do you guys think that would work?
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!
October 1st, 2009 at 2:50 AM ^
if we voted already in this first poll do we have to fill out our info on that google sheet?
October 1st, 2009 at 6:49 AM ^
I am going to have it locked so that you do not have to, but if for some reason you have to I will e-mail you guys.
October 1st, 2009 at 3:13 PM ^
Would it be possible to have an "also receiving votes" category (with point totals) beyond "on the brink"?
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