Sunday, May 20, 2012

IDOLMETRICS: AI11 CONTESTANTS, #3-13: HOW THEY FARED STATISTICALLY

In a continuation from the last Idolmetrics post, this shows the how the contestants gained the score they did.



So let's use Shannon Magrane, the first name, as the template. The leftmost column is always 1, but the column to its right indicates how many times the song is done, we then divide 1 by that number (for example, Shannon did "I Have Nothing" for the 7th time in the competition, which is why a 7 is in that column). Then, we add up the creative score which results from the division, and divide that number by the total number of performances to get the CREPER (or the creativity PER score). The contestant's base score is directly to the right of this column, and if the performance has never been done before, they receive straight up scores (which is why the performance average to its right is zero). However, if it's done before, we take the average of how well that song is done, and the performance average is subtracted from the performance itself. In Shannon's case, she bombed "I Have Nothing". A WNTS score of 21, a WNTS average of 63, done 7 times, so we multiplied the difference by 7. Her 21 felt like a -287, which is game killer right there, essentially. It's also why she left very early. Other comments of note are that Jermaine Jones isn't very creative, and Jeremy Rosado is a bit of underrated fodder.



Next is Heejun and EVP. Nothing of particular note, Heejun's been bombing but everyone knew that he's been overachieving for the large part of the season. He has seriously struggled to put up impact scores; in fact, his highest impact was a 25, which is a poor score. EVP sings well but she seriously lacks creativity, doing a ton of derivative songs--which is why her creative PER is so low. She did progressively worse as the competition went on, which affected her ranking in the past Idolmetrics post.


Next up is Colton and Deandre. Believe it or not, this is the battle of the creativity right here. Look at the creative PERs of both contestants. The difference is, they do it differently: Deandre chooses esoteric soul that shows off the falsetto, and Colton chooses a lot of current Christian rock/emo music that's never been done before. A lot of people have been wondering why Colton got eliminated so early; simple, it's because he never truly had a moment. His highest score was 70 when many got 80s by then. As a result, he's always been hanging mid-pack in the creativity/singing metric in my last post. He's never been truly terrible, but not great either. He did bomb in "September" however, with a negative score, and that seemed to have done him in. Deandre's much the same way--creative, but lacking moments, and having a ton of blunders (two negative scores). He was overachieving for the early part of the season before he recovered a bit, but it was clear he was overstaying his welcome.


Next up is Elise. She was pretty mediocre in creativity, and in fact before the tail end was downright atrocious--I've noted in a past study that was really killing her. For someone who is that old and supposedly versed, she also played the Idol game horribly. Even my statistical measures were putting her constantly in the bottom three, and she never got beyond 5th in both the singing and the voting rankings. So they knew that her days were numbered. Several good performances, with Vienna being the high of 85, but she started tripping herself into the deep negatives later in the competition.



Next is Skylar. Skylar had no real problems--very high creativity (highest for the girl among the competitions), and she chose her Miranda Lambert songs and did that honky tonk stuff that no girl has ever done before (Idol prefers its girls country pop, Skylar bucked that trend). She also had that moment with "Wind Beneath My Wings"--what felt like a WNTS score of 77 actually resonated more like a 120.8, because it was a difficult song to sing in the Idolsphere. She was just rock solid, and unfortunately tripped into a negative at the wrong time at the end, which got her eliminated. She definitely had the stripes to be a potential winner, though, and was leading my predicted voting patterns in T7(ii) and T6.



Next is Hollie. Hollie's a super interesting case--she wasn't creative at all, choosing a ton of derivative songs, but throughout a large chunk of her run she didn't let that get in her way--she ROUTINELY sang those songs above average, so while she didn't put up many great WNTS scores because she never really sang originals, she still was very competent. "The Power of Love" and "The Climb" were probably were most well received, according to the chart below. In fact, I thought she built up enough momentum such that she led the votes at the T5, but she got eliminated at the T4, so who knows. She had one of those Diana DeGarmo runs--hot early, cooled off middle, gained more steam at the end.



Finally, it's Joshua. Joshua's creativity is really horrendous--at this rate, having done so many songs, nearly every one of his songs has been done before on Idol on average. In fact, I'd argue that's what got him eliminated--by doing so many of that, he's fighting against a tide of comparisons. He had his moment--a huge one that came early with "When a Man Loves A Woman", but he's also spotted seven negative (albeit minor) scores throughout his run, and many of his songs are held back by the fact that they were done before. I actually had him leading the voting patterns for a large chunk of the mid rounds, because he did a reasonable job of avoiding the bottom three whether through his work or through the judge's pimpage, but really at the end he started losing steam and I thought he was ranked between 3rd to 5th even dating back to the T7(ii). So there's that. His lack of creativity even hindered him from getting a better score than Phil Phillips, despite being the better singer.



See the next post for analysis on Jessica and Phil--the top 2.

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