Week 4 Tracking Poll Results

Two people thought that Bob Stoops is the team MVP so far.

We have that, and many more interesting results after the jump. First, let me say thank you to all of you who voted! Second, I'm working on a way to get some sort of a feedback or mailbag question involved, but I'm trying to figure out the best way to do it. I always love reading the mailbags on different sports blogs, and the feedback can be pretty hilarious.

Below you will see the questions that have been asked both weeks displayed in a table. The number displayed as a percentage is the voting results from this week, and the number in parentheses is the result from last week. For instance, the "approval rating" of the football team this week is 45%, but last week was 62%. The change is indicated in the last row of the table.

I approve of the way the Oklahoma Sooners are playing football currently.
Yes	45% (62)
No	55% (38)
Weekly change: -17% positive

I am not terribly surprised to see this drop a significant amount, nor am I surprised to see the number of people who disapprove outnumbering the people who approve. We had a tough week at Cincinnati, and it certainly showed in the polling results.

I approve of the way the Oklahoma Sooners football team is playing offense currently.
Yes	62% (55)
No	38% (45)
Weekly change: +7% positive

More people actually approved of the offensive performance following the Cincinnati game than the Air Force game. Perhaps it was Landry Jones turning in a solid performance?

I approve of the way the Oklahoma Sooners football team is playing defense currently.
Yes	11% (51)
No	89% (49)
Weekly change: -40% positive

This was the most massive change that I noticed, and the approval rating of the defense absolutely tanked this week. Only 1 out of every 9 of you approve of the defense at this point - also not terribly surprising.

The Sooners are ranked fairly in the latest AP Poll (#8)
Yes	81% (81)
No, should be higher	0%
No, should be lower	19%
Weekly change: No change

The results of the voting this week were identical to last week in terms of yes and no votes. However, we have more information this week. The 19% of you who disagreed with the #8 ranking of the Sooners thought we should be ranked lower. Nobody thought that the Sooners were underrated.

The Sooners are ranked fairly in the latest Coaches Poll (#8)
Yes	77% (70)
No, should be higher	4%
No, should be lower	19%
Weekly change: +7% positive

OU moved up 1 spot in the Coaches Poll this week, so 7% more people thought that we were ranked fairly in the Coaches Poll. I'm not sure why 4% of you thought that we were ranked fairly in the AP Poll, but should be higher than the identical place in the Coaches Poll.

The most difficult game remaining on the OU schedule, not including the Red River Rivalry, is...
vs. Iowa State	0% (2)
at Missouri	9% (0)
vs. Colorado	0% (0)
at Texas A&M	55% (55)
vs. Texas Tech	2% (6)
at Baylor	0% (0)
at Oklahoma State	34% (34)

There was very little change in this question. The two top choices, A&M and Oklahoma State came in with the exact same figures as last week. The biggest change was that suddenly 9% of you thought that Missouri was our toughest remaining game. It will be interesting to see if the numbers shift around next week with Oklahoma State having knocked off Texas A&M.

The BCS is a fair way to evaluate the national champion in college football.
Yes	40% (38)
No	60% (62)
Weekly change: +2% positive

Not a whole lot of change here. This is still about a pretty consistent split that 2 out of every 5 people think the BCS is fair, and the other 3 don't.

Alabama is deserving of their #1 ranking.
Yes	91% (96)
No	9% (4)
Weekly change: -5% positive

Perhaps it was the fact that Alabama struggled in the first half, but less of you feel that they are deserving of their #1 ranking after this week as compared to last week. 

More Results

Here are the results that were not tracked last week, or were tracked in a different way that makes trends impossible to discover.

• 62% of you were NOT content with beating Cincinnati by only 2 points, while 38% of you were fine with it.
• 57% of you voted Ryan Broyles the team MVP so far, making him the front runner for the second week in a row. This is up from 47% last week. 11% voted for DeMarco Murray, down substantially from 36% last week. 19% of you voted for Landry Jones, and another 6% voted for Jonathan Nelson, which I thought was an interesting choice since you could make the argument that he saved the season. 
• The Jeremy Beal homer is still alive and well, so he got a vote for MVP, and two people cast votes for Bob Stoops!
• 89% of you said you would rather beat Texas than Oklahoma State if you could win only one of those two games per year. 
• 89% of you said you the result of the Red River Rivalry is very important to you, while the other 11% said it was somewhat important to you. Nobody said the result was unimportant. I wonder if it was the same 89% that said they'd rather beat Texas?
• 62% of you said you would choose Ohio State to be the #2 team this week, 26% said Oregon. The remainder of the vote was split evenly at 4% each among Boise State, Florida, and TCU. 
• 55% of you thought the round robin schedule would have no effect on the difficulty of OU's schedule, and 40% thought it would make our schedule less difficult. Only 4% thought it would be more difficult. This is a topic that I'd like to start some debate on soon.
• 91% of you think OU will beat Texas on Saturday, while 9% of you were being Debbie Downers.
• 70% of you think Mack Brown is an elite college football coach. I'm actually kind of surprised, I thought this would be higher given (1) Texas' record over OU in the last 5 years and (2) the fact that he won a national title.
• Nobody is very excited for the men's basketball season. The vote on that question was very close among the remaining 3 options. The winner at 36% was "somewhat excited", second place went to "somewhat excited" at 34%, and a whopping 30% of you are very unexcited for our basketball season.
• 62% of you think that beating Kentucky at the Maui Invitational would be a turning point for our basketball team. The rest must think that our basketball team needs a lot more work to get on the right track.