DWTS Season 12, Week 7 – What if??

What if? What if Donny hadn’t been around to muck up the scoring?? What if there hadn’t been a team dance? Well, that second one is less interesting because Donny caused issues all by himself. 🙂 Seriously, there is always a team dance, so I won’t really talk about that unless someone is desperate to know. Anyway, Courtney said to me, on Twitter – hey, you know, we should have a numbers post showing what the impact was of Donny and the Team dances. My response? Well, gee, I already ran those numbers. 🙂

So, you remember the actual scores right?? Kendra ended up going home, which meant that Romeo and Kirstie both got at least 2,660 more votes per million votes cast than she did – not a huge number by any stretch of the imagination. I figured that Kirstie was easily safe, but the question was between Romeo and Kendra – which one had more fans?? Had Romeo really gained a fanbase? Had Kendra turned people off?? Well, really, when you look at that number of 2,660 that is NOT a lot. It doesn’t truly require that Kendra have turned people off or Romeo gaining a huge fanbase. We’ve had similar discussions regarding Bristol and it’s not a huge effort to get that number – literally only 0.26 percent difference in this case, between Kendra and Romeo. That could be five people working really hard. 🙂 Here are the numbers WITH Donny’s scores and the team dances included:

The Judges Scores and Percentages

Now, look at the exact same table with Donny’s scores removed completely:

The Judges Scores and Percentages, Sans Donny

As you can see, removing Donny’s scores makes a difference. Part of the difference is that the extra score increases the total and therefore decreases the spread. BUT, the fact of the matter is that Donny gave a few wacky scores that impacted the overall positioning of the couples. Here’s what Donny did:

The Donny Effect

Now, I love Kirstie, but that 9 is Cuh-razy. Donny is essentially responsible with putting Ralph in first place and seriously reducing the number of votes Kirstie and Romeo needed to stay over Kendra. Would him not being there have changed who went home? We will never know – but we can speculate. 🙂 With the Donny-free total scores, Kirstie is the new last place finisher and needs the following to stick around:

– Kirstie needs 3,600 more votes per million votes cast in order to stay over Romeo, OR;
– Kirstie needs 7,200 more votes per million votes cast in order to stay over Kendra.

Now, what do you think?? The way it ACTUALLY played out she only needed ONE more vote than Romeo OR 2,660 more votes per million than Kendra. That’s a pretty sizable difference…unless your name is Kirstie, IMO. Remember, she only needs to achieve ONE of those goals above, not both. I think she still would have managed Romeo, easily, but you just never know. What about Romeo? What happens to his chances of going home?? Romeo needs the following to still stick around:

– Romeo needs Kirstie to NOT get 3,600 more votes per million votes cast than him, OR;
– Romeo needs to get 3,600 more votes per million votes cast than Kendra.

This, I’m not sure about. The difference is that he’s ahead of Kirstie by a nice cushion – but the difference between him and Kendra is larger by a thousand or so votes and I have a feeling that it was pretty close between them. We *know* that he got at least 2,660 more votes per million than Kendra did and we know that Kirstie did too…but what about that extra thousand??

My instinct is that nothing would have actually changed. But 7,200 is a good bit more than 2,660. Like I said, we will never know – but what do you think?