Year-End College Football BlogPoll Rankings: Auburn On Top, Big East Nowhere To Be Found

After TCU beat Wisconsin the question was always going to be "how many protest votes do the Horned Frogs get?" and your answer is… six. Not bad. With Auburn an obvious #1 that makes TCU #2. Oregon barely falls after losing on a last-gasp drive and the rest of the poll falls into place about as you expect.

Your most humiliated conference is officially the Big East, which landed zero teams in the final poll, behind the Mountain West, Conference USA, and the WAC. As a reward for those conferences all of their good teams will be carved up and placed in BCS conferences save lonely Nevada and Boise State.

The full results:

Results for Week 16

#	School	Points/blog	SD	Delta
1	Auburn Tigers (42)	24.88	0.33	--
2	TCU Horned Frogs (6)	23.83	0.92	1
3	Oregon Ducks	23.00	1.00	-1
4	Stanford Cardinal	21.88	0.44	1
5	Ohio St. Buckeyes	20.46	1.38	1
6	Oklahoma Sooners	18.67	1.77	3
7	LSU Tigers	17.65	2.13	4
8	Boise St. Broncos	17.56	3.37	2
9	Wisconsin Badgers	17.40	2.32	-5
10	Alabama Crimson Tide	16.65	2.44	6
11	Oklahoma St. Cowboys	14.56	1.57	4
12	Arkansas Razorbacks	14.46	1.98	-4
13	Nevada Wolf Pack	14.31	3.05	--
14	Virginia Tech Hokies	10.77	2.48	-2
15	Michigan St. Spartans	10.54	3.34	-8
16	Mississippi St. Bulldogs	9.25	2.93	5
17	Florida St. Seminoles	8.92	1.90	6
18	Missouri Tigers	7.81	3.02	-4
19	Texas A&M Aggies	6.06	3.09	-1
20	Nebraska Cornhuskers	5.58	2.46	-3
21	Central Florida Knights	3.90	2.90	4
22	South Carolina Gamecocks	3.35	3.15	-3
23	N.C. State Wolfpack	2.42	2.56	7
24	Maryland Terrapins	2.13	2.37	4
25	Utah Utes	1.88	2.49	-5
Others Receiving Votes: Tulsa Golden Hurricane | Iowa Hawkeyes | Notre Dame Fighting Irish | San Diego St. Aztecs | Northern Illinois Huskies | Air Force Falcons | West Virginia Mountaineers | Hawaii Warriors | Florida Gators | Connecticut Huskies | Miami (Ohio) RedHawks | North Carolina Tar Heels | Pittsburgh Panthers | USC Trojans | Penn St. Nittany Lions | South Florida Bulls | Syracuse Orange
Updated: Jan 14, 2011 9:35 AM PST

Total Ballots: 48

Explore votes by team

Explore poll ballots by voter

Justify Your Existence

Um… there isn't any this week. Aside from having NC State a couple slots higher the only differences between this poll and the Coaches are more protest TCU votes and a swap of Utah and NC State.

Wack Ballot Watchdog

• Linebacker U ranks VT 22nd, four spots lower than the next most pessimistic voter.
• Tomahawk Nation's mid-major skepticism will not be stopped even by a Rose Bowl win: they rank TCU 7th. Oregon also falls to ninth, which come on.
• Conquest Chronicles ranked Arkansas 19th, five slots lower than the NMPV.
• Even more come on: Northern Illinois at No. 16 according to Double T Nation. Even even more: same blog ranked Miami (not that Miami) 17th.
• From The Rumble Seat dropped Michigan State one spot to seventh after they were obliterated by Alabama. Alabama? 17th. Down a spot.
• Only nine people even voted for SDSU but one of them—Bull Run—put them 15th.

Now on to the extracurriculars. First up are the teams which spur the most and least disagreement between voters as measured by standard deviation. Note that the standard deviation charts halt at #25 when looking for the lowest, otherwise teams that everyone agreed were terrible (say, Eastern Michigan) would all be at the top.

Most Disagreement

As per usual the mid-major du jour is king of this category.

Ballot Math

First up are "Mr. Bold" and "Mr. Numb Existence." The former goes to the voter with the ballot most divergent from the poll at large. The number you see is the average difference between a person's opinion of a team and the poll's opinion.

Mr. Bold

Your most bizarre ballot belongs to Rise Northwestern, which went SEC nuts after the bowls. LSU(!?!) shoots up to #4 after the Cotton Bowl, ahead of even Stanford and Ohio State. Alabama shoots up to eighth as well, but that only gets them into a more reasonable time zone. It's the back end where things get truly odd: three Big East teams including #20 UConn and #21 Pitt. Wisconsin falls to #11, as well, which is harsh.

Mr. Numb Existence

Sox & Dawgs turns in a truly epic ballot that has a season-low in error, as per usual when it comes to the year end, but only gets to #6 before our perfect ballot quest ends without a 2010 winner. Boise slides up above their #8 placement in the poll at large.

Next we have the Coulter/Kos Award and the Straight Bangin' Award, which are again different sides of the same coin. The CKA and SBA go to the blogs with the highest and lowest bias rating, respectively. Bias rating is calculated by subtracting the blogger's vote for his own team from the poll-wide average. A high number indicates you are shameless homer. A low number indicates that you suffer from an abusive relationship with your football team.

The CK Award

Notre Dame doesn't feature in the poll at all but Subway Domer ranks them 21st after they put it on coachless Miami in their bowl game. This manages to beat out Block U's unwavering support of Utah.

That unwavering support saw the Utes finish atop this list for seemingly the 100th time this year just before the bowls, and the CK Award rose up for the third time this year as Boise State clubbed them 26-3. They were 17 point favorites, so that's a win for the award and a final season record of 8-5, most of them Utah games. Let this be a lesson to you, and here's to Utah going 6-6 next year so we don't have to do this all over again.

The Straight Bangin' Award

The usual formula here is disappointing loss equals win for blog following team and that holds here as the Cornhuskers lost 19-7 to a team they'd turned into a fine paste earlier in the season.

Swing is the total change in each ballot from last week to this week (obviously voters who didn't submit a ballot last week are not included). A high number means you are easily distracted by shiny things. A low number means that you're damn sure you're right no matter what reality says.

Mr. Manic Depressive

Crimson and Cream Machine is your victor here thanks in (very) small part to having Auburn third before the national title game. Nothing on his ballot leaps out as irrational, but he moves almost everyone multiple spots and chucked Big 12 losers way down the list—Nebraska, A&M, and Mizzou average an eight slot drop.

Mr. Xanax

By contrast, BCS Know How's ballot is filled with gentle soothing moves like "Michigan State down 3 after getting disemboweled" and "ditto Utah except only two spots."