DWTS Season 14, Week 4 – Just What Caused That “Shocking” Elimination??

I always see lots of wild theories flying around after (and this time BEFORE) a DWTS Results show about why someone got eliminated. My future former husband, Tom Bergeron, was one of the people acting a bit cray cray – or he hit his head at the same time Melissa did. 🙂

Seriously, the only thing shocking the other night was that Roshon  in the bottom two on a night with such a nice spread. So, let’s take a look at what all had to happen for Sherri to leave and for Roshon to find himself in a real bottom 2 situation.

The Sherri deal is pretty easy to explain.  Gladys got at least 4,300 more vote per million votes cast than Sherri did. Not a huge number and, considering she’s Gladys Knight, not at all shocking or surprising. The woman is an icon, fer cryin’ out loud.  The other part of Sherri’s equation is the other contestants. The important thing to remember is BOTH sides of the equation…it’s not that they might be getting more votes than Sherri at all. She might have been getting similar numbers  of votes as all of them, BUT because she had a lower score, it’s not enough to get “the same” number of votes as everyone else, she had to get MORE. That’s what I’m talking about every week in my numbers posts. She has to cover the spread and beat it by a vote.  And this week, that was 4,300 votes to surpass either William, Jaleel or Melissa – the next closest competitors.

Let me explain it another way: say that Melissa gets 10,000 votes on Monday night and Gladys knocks it out of the park, getting a ton of votes. In order for Sherri to stay, she would have had to get 14,300 votes. Period. It’s that simple, really.  If Sherri is getting MORE votes than Melissa, she can still go home if she doesn’t cover that spread. If Melissa is getting 10,000 votes and Sherri gets 14,000, Sherri still goes home.  Now, the reason why the judges are actually important and why it’s important that they do their job well is because the voters don’t do that good of a job either.  I don’t find it impossible to believe that Sherri was getting more votes than several dancers…just not ENOUGH more. If that makes sense. 🙂 THIS is why it’s not a good idea to leave it up to just the viewers or just the judges – they balance each other’s crazy. 🙂

The reason why it’s so hard to tell how people are doing with the voters is because it’s typically someone near the bottom of the pack going home, so you don’t get a glimpse of how other dancers are doing.  See, Melissa, William and Jaleel may not be getting but just a few more votes than other dancers but it won’t show because between the judges scores and the votes for others it doesn’t work out such that they’re in the bottom. But, the appearance of Roshon in the bottom two is much more illuminating than Sherri’s elimination. If it was just Sherri you wouldn’t know if William was getting 10k or 100k votes – there’s no way of knowing. Although I do think putting him in faux jeopardy might be a clue that he’s not getting the votes they would like. You never know. But with Roshon falling all the way to the bottom two, you at least know that William is doing better in votes than he is.

I saw lots of people saying, “Gladys must be getting TONS of votes” – well the reverse of that is that Roshon was getting no votes. In fact, it almost HAS to be that explanation rather than the other one because it wasn’t just Gladys that beat him; it was William, Jaleel, Melissa, Katherine, Gavin and Maria. Every single one of them covered a spread and definitely got a good number of votes MORE than he did. There’s  no denying it.  For Roshon to be in the bottom two, ALL of the following had to happen:

–          Gladys got at least 25,752 more votes per million votes cast than Roshon, AND;

–          William, Jaleel and Melissa ALL got at least 17,167 more votes per million votes than Roshon, AND;

–          Gavin got at least 12,875 more votes per  million votes cast than Roshon, AND;

–          Katherin got at least 8,583 more votes per million votes cast than Roshon, AND;

–          Maria got at least ONE more vote per million votes cast than Roshon.

Now, that kinda tells you how the others are doing vote wise, but it’s only revealing how they’re doing relative to Roshon. Why do I say that? Well, Look up. Yeah, Gladys got 25 plus thousand more votes than  Roshon did…but how is she doing compared to Donald or William or Jaleel?? We have no idea. Because as tempting as it is to say, “Wow!! Gladys is getting a lot of votes,” the reality is…not necessarily.  Gladys could have gotten 60,000 votes, Roshon could have gotten 30,000 votes and Sherri could have gotten  21,400 and Sherri goes home….but it’s entirely possible that everyone else is getting hundreds of thousands of votes. You don’t know. It’s impossible to say.

A similar situation happened in Season 11. Audrina Patridge was the second highest score of the night with a 6 point spread between her and Kurt Warner. Everyone was claiming that Kurt was getting tons of votes and that he would stick around for a while simply because Audrina went home. He was voted off two weeks later. Only Rick Fox and Audrina  were standing between him and elimination. When he was voted off, he was tied with Bristol and only 3 points behind Jennifer and Kyle. Same situation – Audrina had to be getting a tiny number of votes relative to EVERYONE else. She got beat by a lot of people that night.

For that reason, I think that it’s much more logical to look at it as Roshon NOT getting votes than it is Gladys (or anyone else) getting a ton of votes. It wasn’t just Gladys who beat him – it was everyone but Sherri and Donald – and Donald probably was too, we just don’t know.

So, did I make that clearer or more confusing? 🙂