Pick Six Analysis and Week 2 Results
There were 1,149 people who entered the Pick Six contest and 1,013 unique entries. 225 of you picked the same six teams as somebody else which means you can share in the joy and glory if you picked well, or commiserate if your teams go down in flames. The other 924 of us have nobody who agrees with us about the six best teams.
Before we get on with the analysis of the picks, I’m sure everybody wants to know who Brian picked
- Boise State (looking good)
- Stanford (in good shape)
- Wisconsin (very strong)
- Notre Dame (u mad bro?)
- West Virginia (meh)
- Texas (meh)
If everybody picked randomly we would expect that each team would get 20% of the votes. Let’s see which bandwagons MGoBlog is riding, and which teams we’re shunning.
Group A
We overwhelmingly think Oklahoma and Alabama will be the best teams this season. Almost nobody has any faith in Les Miles and his insanely brave/crazy game strategies.
Group B
Again the highest two ranked teams get a large majority of the picks. In this group our new Big Ten comrade Nebraska gets its fair share of the votes however. We don’t have much belief that the pair of Big Twelve teams will do well because everybody thinks Oklahoma is going to dominate.
Group C
This group has both the largest percentage and the smallest percentage (of ranked teams). Wisconsin has so far certainly seemed to prove that those 42% of people are correct. South Carolina, Virginia Tech and TCU (Wisconsin’s kryptonite from last year) all get pretty close to the baseline 20% share of the vote. So almost all of Wisconsin’s extra votes came at the expense of people who think Petrino won’t do as well at Arkansas without Ryan Mallet.
Group D
The group of death. Every World Cup has one and so does Pick Six. Our three rivals and two SEC teams make Group D a tough pick. One commenter said that he picked his entire ballot of teams that he dislikes, so he picked Michigan St because he would be most pissed if they ended the season highly ranked. For other “rational entries” MGoBlog collectively thought that Notre Dame would do well. How’s that working out for you?
Group E
The first group in which the most common pick was not the highest ranked team from the original poll. People finally got bored of picking the first team on the list so West Virginia is barely more popular than Southern Cal (333 votes to 325). Florida with Charlie Weis’s offense also gets a large percentage of picks while nobody thinks Auburn can afford another Heisman and National Championship.
Unranked Teams
The number one rule of playing Pick Six while it was hosted on Blue Gray Sky was “Do not pick Notre Dame.” In the final year 90% (literally! check it out) of the BGS readers chose Notre Dame (who started ranked but ended up unranked), so I and the other brave souls who picked other teams did well. On MGoBlog it appears that a lot of us followed the “Do not pick Michigan” rule. Texas beats Michigan as the most popular unranked team by fourteen votes (344 to 330). I showed the top seven teams in the bar chart because they represent just over three-fourths of the total picks. The pie chart has the most teams that is still legible. In all there were 50 unranked teams selected, including 10 teams that were selected by only a single person. Perhaps we’ll talk about some of these other selections in future updates.
Only two of these most popular picks are actually ranked in week 2, Texas at #24 and Arizona State ranked #22. The 8 people who picked Baylor are currently doing the best earning 7 points for that #19 ranking. South Florida, the fourth and final team currently ranked, is close behind at #20 earning 6 points in the unranked column for 13 people who thought they would upset Notre Dame in week 1.
Individual ballot analysis
Only one person picked the highest ranked team from each group and then he picked Michigan. So this unnamed user (you know who you are) gets called out for the laziest Pick Six entry.
The most popular ballot according to individual group percentages was Oklahoma, Florida State, Wisconsin, Notre Dame, WVU and Texas. It turns out that this was also tied for the most common ballot with 7 people all picking it. There were 7 people who switched Stanford and Michigan for Florida State and Texas. Both Stanford and Michigan were 2nd place in their respective groups. The five most popular ballots are:
# Entries | Group A | Group B | Group C | Group D | Group E | Unranked |
7 | Oklahoma | Florida St | Wisconsin | Notre Dame | WVU | Texas |
7 | Oklahoma | Stanford | Wisconsin | Notre Dame | WVU | Michigan |
6 | Oklahoma | Florida St | Wisconsin | Notre Dame | USC | Texas |
5 | Oklahoma | Florida St | Wisconsin | Notre Dame | USC | Michigan |
5 | Oklahoma | Florida St | Wisconsin | Notre Dame | Florida | Texas |
Nobody picked the least popular team from each group but the closest is Juager who picked LSU (least popular), Texas A&M (least), South Carolina (second-least), Mississippi State (third-least) and Auburn (least).
Week 2 Rankings
Just like the polls during the season, weekly rankings have no bearing on the final winner. They are merely fun to look at and discuss. The standings at this link should be updated every week regardless of if there is a new Diary.
The current perfect ballot is Oklahoma, Florida State, Wisconsin, Michigan State, Florida, Baylor earning 93 points. Nobody is perfect yet, but our current leader mattodell15 was right on the money with the ranked teams and only lost 5 points by picking Texas instead of Baylor as his unranked team. Those teams play the last week of the season and he will be rooting hard for the Longhorns that week.
The lowest score of 33 is hurt by Notre Dame, Missouri and Michigan all being unranked and TCU dropping to 22nd in the polls. I don’t know if it is good or bad that this is the worst possible score somebody could have.
The weekly Brian watch has him tied with 36 others for 280th place. Notre Dame is killing his picks but all his other teams have a good chance.
September 14th, 2011 at 8:58 PM ^
what all the teams I picked were. Very dissapointed to learn that one of them was Georgia.
September 15th, 2011 at 4:25 AM ^
Me too, man, me too. I've been down on Georgia for years (when some were projecting them to go to the championship game in 2008, I correctly thought that was...umm...crazy). I blame Phil Steele for talking me into picking them this year. I should've trusted my instincts. But we have a lot of games left--maybe they'll turn it around.
September 15th, 2011 at 1:41 PM ^
I got you beat. I combined that with the bulletproof logic of "TCU will slowly climb in the rankings while they inevitably go undefeated". That was an awful lot of scrolling.
September 14th, 2011 at 9:17 PM ^
is killing me. I'm sitting 357th out of those 1,100 or w/e people. Though my Arizona State pick has started off nice!
September 14th, 2011 at 10:13 PM ^
Shit. I just remembered that my "unranked" team was Boston College. What has two thumbs and is probably going to be screwed out of winning by Boston College? THIS GUY
September 15th, 2011 at 11:06 AM ^
September 15th, 2011 at 7:25 AM ^
Notsogood
September 15th, 2011 at 8:33 AM ^
Oklahoma v FSU will shake things up a bit this week.
Why did I pick Ohio State?
September 15th, 2011 at 8:35 AM ^
Losing to a lackluster Auburn team isn't helping my picks. Still sore about the time management skills of Dan Mullen.
September 15th, 2011 at 9:06 AM ^
Sitting in 126th place after 2 weeks. Michigan is keeping my score down, but Mississippi State will hurt as well if they can't handle LSU.
September 15th, 2011 at 9:52 AM ^
UCF is going undefeated and I will win. I picked them because they went undefeated in NCAA 12. Looks like a good pick so far.
September 15th, 2011 at 12:07 PM ^
Sweet I'm in 1050th.
Misery.
September 15th, 2011 at 12:21 PM ^
As painful as this is to say I need Michigan State to beat a desperate ND team for me to stay on top.
September 15th, 2011 at 1:21 PM ^
I went looking for my results and couldn't find them, did I make a mistake or something?
http://mgoblog.com/diaries/pick-six-returns-now-mgoblog#comment-1207945
September 15th, 2011 at 1:25 PM ^
Did you actually read the entire article and enter your picks at the place he linked, or did you just skim the second half and think posting a comment would suffice?
September 15th, 2011 at 3:39 PM ^
Gotcha, my bad. Guilty of skimming here.
September 16th, 2011 at 9:46 AM ^
Jeff- is there any way you can add our ballots to the spreadsheet? If you don't want to or would think it would be unpopular with the rest of the entrants, that's totally fine; I realize it was our mistake. But, if you don't think it would detract from contest fairness and you get a second, mine is here and Scott's is above.
September 16th, 2011 at 10:47 AM ^
Since the comments are time-stamped I don't have a problem adding in the entries that were posted as comments on the original page. If somebody went back and changed their picks, it wouldn't count because the time stamp would show it. So I don't think there's a problem with fairness.
I can only add people who ask me though, because I have no way of knowing who entered under a different name than their username.
I wanted to embed the form right in the diary but it was not working at all. That would probably have solved these problems.
September 16th, 2011 at 3:01 PM ^
Appreciate that, and sorry for the confusion. Hopefully the other guy also sees your comment and asks you himself.
September 16th, 2011 at 5:00 PM ^
Scott is entered also. My point is more that other people who haven't said anything need to ask (preferably nicely).
September 16th, 2011 at 5:42 PM ^
September 15th, 2011 at 4:42 PM ^
Tied for 21st place.
In talking strategy, it looks like the leaderboard will be reshuffled by quite a bit after this week because one of Oklahoma and FSU will lose. That's why I went with the risk averse strategy of picking teams that played pretty much nobody to begin the season. Week 3 national championship!
September 15th, 2011 at 6:35 PM ^
oklahoma will beat fsu, fsu will win out after that, miss st will beat lsu tonight and that will help and seriously, who is houston going to lose to?
September 16th, 2011 at 7:33 PM ^
and they were good! Sort of!
http://mgoblog.com/diaries/pick-six-returns-now-mgoblog#comment-1206376
thanks in advance :)
September 17th, 2011 at 7:25 AM ^
At least I'm ahead of Brian!! 200th place baby.
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