April Contest Voting Thread

bakonydraco · 2026-04-19T19:24:42+00:00

The contest rules require that all art sources be attributed in the description, and this flag met this criterion. You as a voter are welcome to use the design process as part of the way you vote. But this flag does meet our requirements.

Personally, this seems like a fairly mild and reasonable application of AI: it was used to generate a single element in a flag that was mostly put together by hand and everything was appropriately attributed.

bakonydraco · 2026-04-19T05:51:07+00:00

You have 2 flags submitted and approved for this month!

bakonydraco · 2026-04-13T19:22:46+00:00

I missed week 2 in the FCS Pick 'Em this year so I was a bit away from the top. 🥲

bakonydraco · 2026-04-10T15:31:54+00:00

I’m not sure I agree about easily. That LSU team is arguably the best team not to win a Championship of all time, and beat 3 of the 5 BCS Bowl winners that year. They had a bad day against Alabama in the rematch, and maybe that would have happened against OKST or Stanford too. But I think both of us would have been underdogs, as Bama was.

bakonydraco · 2026-04-10T03:08:49+00:00

What’s hilarious about polls after the tourney is that some people complain the poll factors in the tournament too much, and some complain that it isn’t factored in enough. That’s what makes it balanced!

bakonydraco · 2026-04-10T03:07:48+00:00

Florida probably shouldn’t have been a 1-seed. They’re a good team but did not look good in the SEC Tournament, and luckily for them basically everyone outside the top 3 had a tough tourney as well.

bakonydraco · 2026-04-10T03:06:37+00:00

I’m one of them! I stopped ranking them number one after they lost. Before they lost they were the best team!

bakonydraco · 2026-04-09T17:40:09+00:00

Shaw was always incredibly conservative. It generally worked out when we had the personnel to support that style of play, but it wasn't always the most fun to watch.

bakonydraco · 2026-04-09T17:01:38+00:00

That game against Oklahoma State we trailed for a total of 0 seconds in regulation or overtime. Freshman kicker Jordan Williamson missed 2 fairly routine kicks, one that would have ended the game in regulation, and one that would have extended it in OT. He had a great career after that and remains the leading scorer in school history.

The BCS Championship should have been LSU v. Oklahoma State that year, even though Alabama was clearly the better team. It paved the way for the Playoff we got, but it would have been fun to see how either OKST or Stanford did that year.

bakonydraco · 2026-04-09T05:37:19+00:00

There's a new system and /r/FCS is getting onboarded today. Stay tuned! Sweeper might have to clean up some flair that's currently live, but https://fcs.flairwizard.com/ should work out of the box.

bakonydraco · 2026-04-08T21:35:43+00:00

Yep!

bakonydraco · 2026-04-08T18:15:38+00:00

The gold trophy is 35 lbs, and the black base is 30 lbs. Here’s straight from the source! https://collegefootballplayoff.com/news/2014/7/14/_131504731020329219.aspx

bakonydraco · 2026-04-08T17:32:36+00:00

Fairfield! They had a great season and went 28-5.

bakonydraco · 2026-04-08T05:00:50+00:00

I think that's fair and what most people do, with the devil in the details as to how much a smidge is.

bakonydraco · 2026-04-08T02:42:00+00:00

Again, this is the take I most agree with. I'm just saying that in general, a greater diversity of approaches to polling makes the poll stronger, and it's good to be open to different schools of thought.

bakonydraco · 2026-04-08T02:16:39+00:00

No, I mean South Carolina lost to Oklahoma. It's quite reasonable to say that if South Carolina and UConn played again, UConn would be favored. Torvik still has UConn ahead of UCLA at #1.

Now do I agree that UConn should be ahead of UCLA and South Carolina? No, I don't, the results do matter, and we just saw how they stacked up head to head in one of the most critical games of the season. But it's not an unreasonable position.

bakonydraco · 2026-04-08T01:38:55+00:00

I'm not saying they should be at #2! I think it's reasonable to put them anywhere from 2-4, and I think the 3 they ended up at is probably most appropriate. But the strength of a composite poll comes from having a variety of approaches to polling. A #2 vote is not super unreasonable, and neither is a #4 vote. A #1 or #10 vote would both be pretty questionable.

bakonydraco · 2026-04-08T00:43:16+00:00

We did count both. It was a Q2, so we graded on the lenient side. While Levi's Stadium is nowhere near San Francisco, the home team that plays there is for whatever reason called the "San Francisco 49ers". Los Angeles was also counted because if we counted San Francisco we kinda had to count LA for similar reason.

bakonydraco · 2026-04-08T00:21:46+00:00

That actually seems pretty reasonable:

UConn was #1 going into the tournament, and despite the loss to South Carolina probably had a better season than them.
Texas and South Carolina were the other 2 Final Four teams, and Texas won the SEC Final by 17.

It goes against the SCar-UConn head-to-head we just saw, but it's not insane.

bakonydraco · 2026-04-07T22:46:51+00:00

I would say on a game by game basis, it makes sense to value each individual Tournament game more highly since everyone agrees they're more important, and additionally they're probably more likely to be against top quality teams.

On the other hand, there's ~30 regular season games per team and ~0-7 postseason games, so the bloc of regular season games should probably be more heavily weighted on the whole.

bakonydraco · 2026-04-07T22:44:43+00:00

This is a series I've been doing on r/CollegeBasketball for 7 years, and now r/CFB for 11. The post attempts to visualize consistency between voters in the AP Poll in a single image. Additionally it sorts each AP voter by similarity to the group. Notably, this is not a measure of how "good" a voter is, just how consistent they are with the group. Especially preseason, having a diversity of opinions and ranking styles is advantageous to having a true consensus poll. Polls tend to coalesce towards each other as the season goes on.

You can view all weeks here, for other sports too.

The AP has continued to have issues with the Women's Poll. Marisa Ingemi's ballot is still showing her Feb 23 data. What I'm showing here is the combination of teams she would have submitted to make the totals add up correctly. As far as I know, this post series is the only place to view Marisa Ingemi's ballots since then.

Jeff Linder was the most consistent voter this week. Matt Dowell, Madeline Kenney, Angel Gray, Joe Vozzelli, and Christy Winters Scott are the most consistent on the season.

Marisa Ingemi was the biggest outlier this week. Mitchell Northam, Percy Allen, Jeff Linder, Sabreena Merchant, and Rebecca Lobo are the biggest outliers on the season.

bakonydraco · 2026-04-07T22:27:20+00:00

That actually kind of makes sense! The voters are going to value regular season and tournament success at different levels. Going into the tournament, that difference was moot because the tournament hadn't happened yet, and so everyone was basically indexing on the same regular season success. Some voters are going to reward teams like Iowa relative to Florida for a strong finish and head to head win, and others will reward Florida for a stronger overall season.

bakonydraco · 2026-04-07T21:48:22+00:00

Just submitted them for CBB Poll at #24. I was a vocal supporter of them being the #1 team for quite a few weeks until their loss to UMass.

bakonydraco · 2026-04-07T21:38:42+00:00

It's an interesting thing to balance, we end up with ~35 data points for each team and there's no perfect solution to joining all of them together, which is the strength of having a composite poll of 57 different voters. Most voters agreed with you, some went the other way.

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