Like many other people, my predictions for the American Idol Bottom 3 were not very good. I only picked one of the 3 bottom dwellers, Thia Megia, and guessed Stefano Langone and Casey Abrams would both have enough votes to be safe. Obviously the Vegas oddmakers were not predicting it either as they had Casey as a 50/1 longshot to be eliminated last night. They have updated the odds to win on bodog.com now, and Casey's odds have dropped from 6/1 to 15/2 to tie him with Jacob Lusk. Lauren Alaina has also dropped a bit from 9/2 to 5/1 which puts her at the 4th position, instead of being tied with Scotty McCreery for 3rd as she was yesterday. Thia has seen her odds drop slowly and landing in the bottom 3 last night lowered her odds to 20/1 instead of 16/1. The big winner last night? Haley Reinhart, of course, who was not in the bottom 3 and saw her Vegas odds raise from 100/1 to 75/1. She is still the biggest longshot, but she is still there and going on tour too! James Durbin also has seen steady improvements in his odds, dropping from 11/2 to 5/1 to 4/1 to 7/2 today to be safely established as the #2 favorite behind Pia Toscano. There are now only four gents who have never been in the bottom three (James, Scotty, Jacob and Paul), and only two ladies (Pia and Lauren.)
The WhatNotToSing.com scores for the week are in now, and they again support well the bottom three picks. Now that we have 4 weeks of data, the bar graph can demonstrate the trends for each contestant pretty well. Again I have the contestants sorted by their rating for this week. Sure enough, the bottom 3 in WNTS scores for the week were Casey, Thia and Stefano. Over the 4 week period Casey and Thia have seen the most dramatic dropoffs, and Pia and James have been the most consistently good. I also have a simple graph of the average scores over the past 4 weeks for all the remaining contestants (removing the wild card performances):
Casey drops from #5 to #7 when averaging scores over the past 3 weeks instead of 4 weeks, and Thia drops from #9 to dead last. Nobody else moves either up or down by more than a single position except Naima who moved up 2 from #10 to #8. If we look at the bottom 5 for both bar graphs, we see that all of the contestants who fall in the bottom five have been in the declared "Bottom 3" on a results night except for one person: Paul McDonald. His scores have never been that good but he continues to be called safe, which means he has a lot of voting fans somewhere.