Week 2
I've been doing a series like this over on /r/CFB for 6 years now, started for College Basketball last year. The post attempts to visualize consistency between voters in the AP Poll in a single image. Additionally it sorts each AP voter by similarity to the group. Notably, this is not a measure of how "good" a voter is, just how consistent they are with the group. Especially preseason, having a diversity of opinions and ranking styles is advantageous to having a true consensus poll. Polls tend to coalesce towards each other as the season goes on.
Brian McInnis is once again out this week, and John Feinstein quit after 23 years after being heckled by Houston fans who were mad at him for leaving them off his preseason poll. Neither voter was replaced, so there are 63 voters in the week 2 poll.
Clayton Collier was the most consistent voter this week. The top 5 on the season are now David Cloninger, Clayton Collier, B.J. Rains, Sheldon Mickles, and Lauren Kirschman.
Dave Preston was the biggest outlier by a fair margin at over 5 ranks away from the average rank. The top 5 outliers are now Jesse Newell, Dave Preston, Donald Hunt, Dave Borges, and Jon Wilner.
Three voters have us 5th :)
One voter has us 18th :(
and 3 didnt rank us at all
Shout out to Sam Blum for putting us 4th.
I like wilner now.
We’re about to add Donald Hunt to our AP voter body count on Twitter aren’t we? Haha
I certainly wouldn't mind at least hearing an explanation from him.
Wow, TTech at #6 and UH at #18. Maybe he meant to have them reversed?
I measured my own personal ballot for the /r/CollegeBasketball poll under the same scoring system, and it ended up at 7.68 this week. It actually wasn't the biggest outlier (/u/mountm holds that honor), and was far closer to the norm than my preseason poll, but it's neat (and perhaps unsurprising) to the AP Poll's outliers are quite a bit more constrained than on this sub.
I'm sure that has a lot to do with the poll visibility. AP ballots are scrutinized by a much larger population than /r/CollegeBasketball ballots - and the average Internet troll has less compunction about disparaging voters who don't line up with their preferred ranking methodology (or even just their preferred results). As a consequence I would guess that strong outlier voters are less likely to stick around for the long term in the AP poll.
Also, is that 7.68 score based on your ballot compared to the AP consensus, or compared to the /r/CollegeBasketball consensus?
That's compared to AP consensus, I could calculate it to CBB consensus but it would probably be similar since the poll tends to end up pretty similar. I'm not sure if you saw this in the post, but given that a voter quit because of the harassment he got on Twitter, I suspect you might be right.
Makes sense.
I do find that measuring the variance based on sigma/standard deviation for each team provides a fuller picture of "consistency" since it takes into account the fact that higher ranked teams tend to have their placements more tightly clustered. So for example, ranking Gonzaga at #3 would be considered more of an outlier than Rutgers at #21.
It's definitely more work to do that though.
/u/perryapsis has a cool post like this on /r/CFB that digs into the distribution of rankings for each team.
I think Chris Murray accidentally wrote in Michigan when he meant to write in Michigan State. He has Michigan ranked 9th, far higher than anyone else, and doesn't rank MSU at all.
This is distressing and almost certainly true lol
The Kansas voter really didn’t rank us but kept Villanova at 4? Ok buddy.....
there were actually a bunch of other voters that had nova in the top seven and tech out of the poll entirely. I notice they were votes from nc state, uconn, ucf, illinois, and (surprise surprise) nova.
There were a few others that left VT out but at least they dropped nova out of their top ten.
I’m offended that we got less votes than last week after covering the spread 😠
Indiana is really more of a Football school now.
We lost our QB for the year 😭
Such a bummer, he's been a joy to watch. Indiana is still probably favored at this point to make the conference championship, but it's a blow to lose him.
I can’t believe anyone would put us in the top 15. They must have not watched a Mike White season recently
Lol at the guy that has us at #18 and Tech at #6
It's an interesting decision that I'm guessing implies he was unaware of the result of that game.
The writers from Pitt, Syracuse, & Virginia have us ranked the highest at 4th... what a strange world we live in.
I’ll have whatever Jesse Newell is smoking with us at 3 after that Coppin State game. McNamara’s #4 Tennessee is a more reasonable claim than that.
WVU got three 4th place votes and got a 19th place vote💪🏿💪🏿💪🏿
Who the hell is Cecil Hurt and why would he ever trust a Texas basketball team to play to top ten standards
Bruce Pascoe coming in clutch giving us 1 vote before his hometown team plays us on Wednesday
<3 Dave Borges
John Werner really put us at 8 lmao
Edit: Doug Doughty as well