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Posted

Voting for the H.U.M.A.N poll concluded Sunday night. Thanks to all who participated. In total, we received 29,522 votes from 632 voters. As is custom, we took all of these votes and ran a Bradley-Terry algorithm on it to produce a 1 to 365 ranking by humans, for humans.

This year we changed two things about our approach in an attempt to improve poll output:

  1. The introduction of super-voters. If you finished in the top 50 of either of the previous two iterations of the poll, you earned double power in the voting.¹ There were 55 voters who took advantage of this. 

  2. The best teams were more often matched up against the best teams. For instance, Houston was matched up against teams outside the H.U.M.A.N. poll top 30 just twice this season. Last year they had 35 matchups outside the top 30 (with fewer total votes). That should give us better data on the top teams. Like, very few people think Houston is outside the top ten this season. So there’s no reason to make people prove that. Actually, few people think they’re outside the top 1, except possibly a bunch of AP poll voters.

That’s my way of saying that Houston was the clear choice for #1 by the humans, joining Kansas (2024) and UConn (2025) as previous #1’s. The Coogs will need to do better than those teams or we will officially have a H.U.M.A.N. poll curse to consider.

The final results are here and the top ten is below. It’s a pretty sensible top ten!

  https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.ama  

As you can see from the graphic, we provide two ratings for whatever it’s worth. The BT (Bradley-Terry) rating is the raw rating from the algorithm. You can use it to get an idea of how likely it is that one of our voters would pick one team over another. 

Using Houston's and Duke's ratings, we find that Houston would have a 70% chance of being picked over Duke by our electorate². You can click on a team to see all of their votes:

  https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.ama  

Houston was picked 76.7% of the time against Duke in reality. The computer has to balance out all of the matchups, though. If future voters behaved like past voters, we’d expect them to be slightly less bullish on Houston in this matchup, based on all of their other votes.

The other rating is the Ln rating, which transforms the BT rating to a linear scale so you can compare teams on the same scale. For instance the biggest gap in the ratings were between #364 and #365, and then #1 and #2. The next biggest gap was between #18 Illinois and #19 Auburn. If you think the humans are too low on Illinois and their band of Balkan-born ballers, the Illini are actually as close #9 as they are to #19. You won’t get that kind of information from the AP poll! (Neither the BT rating nor the Ln rating actually mean anything relative to my own ratings, however.)

I’d say the poll’s results seem pretty reasonable at the top. Y’all seem to hate UCLA for whatever reason, and you love St. John’s. It does seem like humans really love Rick Pitino. And to be fair, UCLA was the team most valued by super-voters relative to regular voters.

The team the voters disagreed on the most was Louisville, who finished a sensible 15th, but the details are wild. They received a win in a matchup against #1 Houston and a win from a super-voter against #2 Purdue, while also taking two losses to #48 Georgia, three losses to #49 SMU, and a loss to #64 Northwestern. 

Finally, we can infer conference ratings from your picks and - spoiler - the top 12 leagues are in the same order they’ll be in my preseason ratings. So we are in agreement on that.

  https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.ama  

If you participated, you can find your ballot here. (We’ll eventually get past results on our brand new account page.) As the season progresses, we’ll update the ballot to show your correct picks, ultimately crowning the Champion Ball-Knower of the Year after the national championship game. Good luck!

1

Should there be a fourth iteration of the H.U.M.A.N. poll, we plan to keep the super-voter concept going. However, you will lose super-voter status if you finish in the bottom 50 of the final standings.

2

We take Houston’s BT rating of 2276 and Duke’s rating of 969.6 and plug it into a simple formula like so: 2276 / (2276+969.6) = .701

 

 

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Posted (edited)

The Big XII bottom teams must be catastrophically terrible.  The Top 6 are in the National Top 17, with Baylor also  at 25.

Edited by Iceman

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