This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/cfb by /u/Perryapsis on 2025-09-04 11:45:00+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 1 (That is, the pre-season rankigns that apply during Week 1 games). 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. 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 South Carolina is ranked 10th in this week’s poll, and 12 voters placed the Gamecocks 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. Some unique votes are annotated with the name of the corresponding voter. The most common selection (the mode) for each team is shaded yellow unless it matches the team’s rank. 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.
Finally, I note violations of the Condorcet Criterion on the bottom left corner of the black space. These occur when Team A is ranked above Team B in the poll, but Team B would win if you ignored the points system and just asked the voters “Which team do you have ranked higher?” I note every instance of this when it would affect the placement of a team in the Top 25, but not necessarily if it only flips teams’ positions in the receiving-votes category.
This season, scores will be highlighted (lowlighted) in black to indicate a loss instead of using a W/L column. I did this at the end of the season last year, and it was well received, so it returns for this entire season. This way is easier to see at a glance and slightly reduces the clutter on the left side of the table.
COMMENTARY FOR THIS WEEK
The left end of the upper Wilner Diagonal this week is set by Pete Yanity ranking Logo Ohio State 4th. Its right end is set by Chad Bishop, Kevin Carter, and David Jablonski, none of whom ranked Logo Notre Dame after their loss to Logo Miami (FL). Nobody else had them lower than 15th. It will be very interesting to see if any of that changes after the Fighting Irish take a bye. The lower Wilner Diagonal was set by Sam McKewon putting Logo Utah 7th, while the Utes’s barely snuck into the last available spot in the rankings and were left of 28 ballots (42%). The ends of the diagonal are set by Robert Cessna’s lone vote for Logo Oregon in 1st place and any of the unique votes for teams with only 2 points.
The lowest-ranked team to sweep all 66 ballots (a new AP Poll record) was Logo Clemson. Despite losing at home, nobody ranked them lower than 17th. The highest-ranked team to fail to sweep was Logo Notre Dame due to the aforementioned votes on the Wilner Diagonal. Teams that missed the Top 25 received 132 votes (8.0%) for 552 points (2.6%). 113 unique team-rank pairs occurred this week (6.8%). Logo Florida State received the most distinct placements this week, receiving votes for 20 different ranks from 4th to 24th. Despite 5 voters omitting the Seminoles, nobody put them in exactly last place. As usual, the #1 team, Logo Ohio State, received the most matching votes with 55 (83%). The least-matched team was Logo Indiana, with only 3 voters (4.5%) placing the Hoosiers in exactly 23rd.
Also as expected, the strongest consensus exists about the top few teams, while the largest disagreements occur for teams near the 15-20 range. If we use the standard deviation and count unranked “votes” with 0 points, we get the following extremes:
| Team | Standard Deviation |
|---|---|
| Logo Florida State | 5.73 |
| Logo Oklahoma | 4.67 |
| Logo Utah | 4.56 |
| Logo Michigan | 4.47 |
| Logo Arizona State | 4.46 |
| … | … |
| Logo Georgia | 1.59 |
| Logo Miami (FL) | 1.35 |
| Logo Louisiana State | 1.08 |
| Logo Penn State | 0.93 |
| Logo Ohio State | 0.54 |
There are three Condorcet Criterion violations in the Top 25 this week. First, 35 voters have Logo Texas higher than Logo Oregon, but the Ducks got 9 more points to sneak into #6. Similarly, 36 voters had Logo Arizona State above Logo, but the Illini beat them for #11 by 5 points. Finally, Logo Michigan and Logo Florida State are tied at 33 each, but the Seminoles somehow managed to end up 19 points clear of the Wolverines. Also of note is that, due to Logo Brigham Young only receiving 12 votes, they flip or tie with several other teams in the high 20s, but since they missed the Top 25, I didn’t do a detailed analysis.
LOOKING FORWARD
(Nobody directly replied to this in the preseason, so I am including it again this week)
I always have ideas for how to improve this that I never seem to actually finish. Sometimes it’s from a lack of skill, sometimes a lack of time, and sometimes I lose motivation because it seems like such a small detail that nobody will notice or care. If you have any ideas for things I could do to make this post better, >> please let me know! <<
Here’s my grab bag of stuff that I’d like to do … eventually, in no particular order but kinda grouped by topic.
Stuff that used to work once upon a time…
- Identify the largest outlier votes and adjust them to see if it would affect the ranks at all
- Make tables showing the progression of each team over the course of the season
- Make tables showing how each voter’s ballot changed week-by-week and season-to-date
- Make tables showing the effect of ranked-vs-ranked games (e.g. winner +150 points, loser -222 points, the missing 72 points went to Teams A, B, and C, and over the course of the season, conference X has cannibalized N points to conferences Y and Z)
- Do stats by rank instead of team (e.g. X points is usually enough to be top 10, Y points usually gets you into the top 25, 50% of the top 10 have at least one vote below Z, etc)
Stuff that would be cool to see for 3 seconds but then totally not worth the effort
- Compare the results of alternative scoring systems like Single Tranferrable Vote and CFP’s listing-ranking iterative process
- Make it into a 3D bar chart
- Map out voters (based on affiliation or beat) and see how geographic location affects sentiment for each team
- Animate the table transitioning from one week to the next
More data analysis
- Show standard deviations for each team
- Show z-scores of unusual votes
- Treat teams with unranked “votes” as a truncated distribution and try to correct for the fact that you can’t give a team fewer than 0 points
- Treat rankings as statistical variables and say e.g. for Illinois and Arizona State, with μ1 = 12.95, μ2 = 12.88, σ = ??? something, N = 66, what is our actual confidence interval that Illinois > Arizona State?
- Compare with other polls. E.g. is there a statistically-significant difference between voter preferences in the AP Poll and the Coaches’ Poll? How about the r/CFB Poll? How many ways can you even analyze this without [jelly-beaning][xkcd]?
- Create an alternative visual with box-and-whisker plots or histograms instead of numbers to show the general shape of the distributions.
Cosmetic improvements
- Dark mode
- Colorblind-friendly color scheme
- Update old team logos unless the old one looks cooler or is easier to read when small
- Get rid of the TV station column since I can’t get that data anymore
- Declutter the left side… somehow.
- Also add records while I’m at it. Without re-cluttering it… somehow.
- Find a better symbol for a bye week than a guy sleeping in
And I’m sure there are a a million other things. Feel free to offer feedback and your own ideas!
Thanks again to /u/bakonydraco for providing the ballot data; you can find his weekly visualization here!