Also it hurt to let bama have the tie breaker over the vols, and I kinda want y'all to acknowledge how brave I am for facing my fears like that
"State" schools seem to be having a moment, other than Michigan State, which is having it's own moment
Arkansas and Iowa are tied and neither were ranked last week. I put Arkansas in the 24 spot as they received 11 votes last week to Iowa's 10
Lastly you may have noticed a new column this week. That's because this is a real ballot somebody took the time to open 25 drop down menus and submit:
Louisville
Troy
Baylor
Cinicinnati
Ohio State
Kansas State
UTEP
Mississippi State
Appalachian State
Navy
Liberty
Miami (OH)
Hawaii
Fresno State
Jacksonville State
Georgia State
FIU
Ball State
East Carolina
Costal Carolina
Central Michigan
BYU
Akron
Arkansas State
Army
I want to be as hands off this data as possible, but it just didn't sit right ranking Troy and Baylor because of the strangest ballot I've ever seen. And it just raises so many questions in my mind. Who are you? Do you actually think Troy has a good football team? Were you that drunk that you don't even know? Were you a traveler who just thought they would participate in this small community but doesn't know football? Are you a buckeye that was trying to subtly boost tOSU's points? Are you doing a bit? Were you doing this specifically to fuck with me? Because it worked. I haven't been sleeping since I saw this. But whoever you are if you have a legit system that gave you these rankings let me know and I'll rework the table. The results tab on the spreadsheet shared in the post will keep that entry but the table above was scored without that entry.
I like how they got lazy in the second half of their ballot and just filled in teams at the beginning of the alphabet. The attention span for that troll job was really short.
I guess it could also be an early season computer poll, but I don't understand submitting one this early if it looks like that.
I'm okay with ties (but I'm also a weirdo who thinks games should be able to tie and is okay with split national champions). IIRC, r/cfb had the occasional tie and split the #10 spot in half -- but they had tons of voters so that was rare. I think if we get to, say, 20ish regular voters then I would suggest allowing them.
Kind of bummed we already seem to have gotten a throwaway ballot, and surprised it wouldn't have messed up the poll too much given our small sample size (although it would have made a mess of "others receiving votes"). If they really wanted to manipulate the poll, they could have been more crafty about it and then we would have had to keep it. I think you made the right call here, but we should probably set up some guidelines for throwing out ballots. I don't know if it would be too much work, but if they are missing more than, say, 5 teams on the otherwise final rankings then I would say it should be thrown out. The criteria could be looser than that if only a few games were played (and in the preseason I like it being a free-for-all).
Considering that one of those teams lost their game and the other won their game (not without some hiccups), I feel like the true #10 is obvious. Although I wish we did ties so that we could get a 50/50 Bama/Tennessee logo at #10 in the banner.