This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/cfb by /u/Perryapsis on 2024-11-06 13:00:01+00:00.
TABLE
HOW TO READ THIS TABLE
Teams are ranked in their order from the Logo (note for mobile users: everywhere you see a “Logo” link, that means that inline flair is shown on old.reddit.com/r/cfb) AP Poll for Week 16. The column to the right of the team name shows the number of points that team received using the AP Poll’s Borda count rules. New for the 2023 season, the following two columns show information about each team’s previous and upcoming games. The following columns show how many votes for each ranking the team received. The ‘U’ column shows how many voters left the team unranked (off their ballots entirely). Gridlines are placed every 5 rows and columns for ease of reading. A thick line is placed below the 25th-ranked team to distinguish “ranked” teams above it to “receiving votes” teams below it.
Some cells are shaded to highlight points of interest. The green diagonal highlights how many voters ranked a team exactly where they ended up in the overall poll. For example, Logo Notre Dame is ranked 10th in this week’s poll, and 10 voters placed them exactly in their 10th spot. Values for which a team received no votes at that rank are shaded in red, while placements chosen by only exactly one voter are highlighted in blue. The most common selection (the mode) for each team is shaded yellow. Finally, since there are very few votes that ever end up near the top-right or bottom-left of the chart, those cells are filled in with black diagonally as much as possible without covering up any nonzero values. This helps naturally guide the eye while viewing the chart and helps locate the most unusual votes. We lightheartedly call these the “Wilner” diagonals.
COMMENTARY
This week is notable for having some rankings that do not pass the Condorcet criterion by large margins. If you asked each voter, “Head to head, do you have Logo Louisiana State or Logo Texas A&M higher?” Texas A&M would win by a convincing 39-23 margin. So while 63% of pollsters have the Aggies higher, because the AP Poll uses Borda Count scoring, the Tigers beat A&M for the #14 spot by 45 points. Similar flips would out Logo Notre Dame over Logo Brigham Young, 36-26; Logo Clemson over Logo Army, 35-27; and Logo Kansas State over Logo Colorado, 38-23.
The trend of strong consensus continues this week. In past years, there has not been this much agreement amongst voters, especially near the bottom of the rankings. This week, only 15 top-10 votes were cast for teams that didn’t end up ranked that high. Typically, almost every team below 15 fails to appear on each ballot, and “unranked” is usually the most common placement for teams below 20. This week, only one team above 21 failed to sweep all 62 ballots, and only by one vote (Koki Riley didn’t rank Logo Army). No teams in the receiving-votes section received any votes higher than 20.
Thanks again to u/bakonydraco for providing the ballot data; you can find his weekly visualization here. Also check out u/ajseventeen’s post doing the same visualization for the r⁄CFB Poll (and even including the stuff I have failed to put on the chart this season). And thank you for reading!