Our final projection: Mark Ingram, in a close one.
It's such a close race, that we'd like to hang on for a few more days and convince another hundred voters to share their picks -- but alas, time has run out.
There's also something tempting about just declaring it "too close to call", but that just won't do.
We're now up to 313 ballots, 33.8% of all the ballots. And on those 313 ballots, we project that Mark Ingram will earn 1336 points - or 48.1% of the maximum 2778 possible.
We're now projecting that Toby Gerhart will earn 1241 points - or 44.7% of the max possible. Ndamukong Suh will earn 1188 points - or 42.8% of the max possible.
Colt McCoy comes in at 939 points, or 33.8%; and Tim Tebow comes in at 295 points, or 10.6%.
We are reasonably confident that Mark Ingram will win the Trophy. With only a 3.4% advantage over Gerhart, it's far from a sure thing - as our past projections have overestimated the top-two gap by 2.6 to 4.2%. That said, it would take a fairly dramatic difference between the known and unknown ballots for Ingram to lose.
We are not, however, confident that Gerhart will defeat Suh for second place. With less than a 2% gap, it's too close to call. Even late Friday, as batches of ballots were coming in, Suh and Gerhart traded places several times.
We're very confident that McCoy will place fourth - and that Tebow will place fifth.
In addition, we're projecting with confidence that Ndamukong Suh will earn the most first place votes. We also project that Toby Gerhart will earn the second-most first place votes (even though we've tracked more #1s for Ingram.)
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