College BlogPoll Ballot: Week 6 Draft

Here is the first draft for Rocky Top Talk's ballot for the college blogpoll.  Discussion of the numbers in the computer follows after the jump, including one significant change to the computer system that (I think) will make the numbers a little more reliable.

Rank	Team	Delta
1	Florida
2	Alabama
3	Texas
4	Virginia Tech	2
5	Boise State	2
6	TCU	3
7	Southern Cal	3
8	Iowa	3
9	Nebraska	7
10	Cincinnati	2
11	Ohio State	1
12	Oregon	12
13	Penn State	2
14	South Florida
15	Miami (Florida)
16	Brigham Young	9
17	LSU	7
18	Utah
19	West Virginia	4
20	Georgia Tech
21	Wisconsin	1
22	Arizona	4
23	Kansas	10
24	Oklahoma	2
25	South Carolina
Last week's ballot

Dropped Out: Auburn (#17), Connecticut (#19), Stanford (#21).

Quick Notes:

• A lot of teams are tightly bunched together.  As you can see in the numbers below, many teams are statistically equivalent, which is the computer's way of conceding that six games isn't enough for definitive separation.  But hey, here we are.
• Colley is out.  After waiting far too long (again) for Colley to update his rankings, I imported the strength of schedule numbers from Sagarin instead.  They operate in the usual manner:  the 1-AA teams are filtered out, the scores are then scaled with an average of zero (i.e. positive is above average) and a standard deviation of 1.  But Sagarin actually updates in a prompt and timely manner.
• Sagarin appears to be more reliable.  The one sticky point about Colley is that he lumps 1-AA teams into groupings.  In other words, if Charleston Southern and Northwestern State get lumped together, then Florida and Baylor have their schedules intrinsically tied together through those schools.  This makes little sense.  And having compared the effect of Sagarin's and Colley's SOS metrics on the computer, I think I will probably stay with Sagarin going forward.
• Weights are changed.  Partly due to the switch to Sagarin and partly due to the increasing data, the weights are now:  W/L = 25; SOS = 15; Pass Efficiency Defense (PED) = 9; Run Defense (RD) = 8; Third Down Offense (3DO) = 7; Total Defense (TD) = 6; Pass Efficiency Offense (PEO) = 5; Opponents' Points Per Game (OPPG) = 3; Total Offense = 2; Third Down Defense (3DD) = 1.

Computer Standings

For convenience, only the top 35 are shown.  I will probably put the entire list out later on in a dedicated post.

Visually, here's the distribution of scores among all 1-A teams:

Here are just the top 25:

And a look at the conference averages:

There you go.  Should any changes be made?  If so, what?  This is the draft, but the final ballot can have human overrides if there is sufficient reason to do so.