American Idol Season 10: And then there were two

Despite the ardent voting of my cat, Slinky, and I from our Facebook accounts, Haley Reinhart was eliminated from American Idol last night to leave us with "American Idol: The Teen Country Edition". But what that meant to me was new Las Vegas betting to odds to add to my graph which is now composed of just two contestants. I knew Scotty McCreery would continue to be the favorite, but now his betting odds have dropped to a paltry 1/5. That is right, if you bet $10 on him and he wins, you earn a whopping $2. The odds for Lauren Alaina have actually ticker up a little from yesterday to land at 3/1, so you would still earn $30 on a $10 bet on her. Below is the running odds graph, where I left Haley on it, just because a graph with only two lines looks rather sparse (plus Haley had a pretty dramatic run, having once been a 100/1 long shot).

How many people think Lauren has a chance of winning? If we compare their performance numbers at WhatNotToSing.com, Lauren has an average that trumps Scotty's by 7 points (61.6 versus 54.4). In fact right now there are two eliminated contestants with averages higher than Lauren's (Pia at 78.8 and James at 64.7), and a total of five other Season 10 contestants with averages higher than Scotty's (Pia, James, Lauren, Haley at 61.2 and Casey at 57.0):

I made a graph of the What Not To Sing scores for the Top 3 where I averaged their performances for each week to see if I could see a trend, and besides Haley always being on top over the past 5 weeks there is not much of one. Scotty's trend has actually been downwards since a peak during Top 6 week, and Lauren's has also been going down over the past couple weeks since a nice peak on Top 5 week.

But in reality I do not think it matters since I think Scotty is blowing away the competition. One way to check is to look at the busy signal stats from DialIdol over the past 3 years. Each contestant has had three toll-free lines during Top 3 week and we can see the historical data for each season:

In Season 8 it was close but by Top 3 week you could see that Danny Gokey had 3 of the 4 least busy phone lines, so he was going out #3, and since Kris Allen had 2 of the top 3 busiest lines he was going to win. So it was easy to predict it would be Kris than Adam then Danny.

In Season 9 last year, Lee had the three busiest phone lines and Casey James had 3 of the 4 least busy. So it was easy to pick that it would be Lee then Crystal then Casey.

This year the ladies busy signals are very mixed so it was difficult to have predicted who was leaving this week. But Scotty tops all three busiest phone lines, and his busy percentages are tremendous, all of them over 20%. Two of this three busy percentages were busier than Kris Allen's busiest phone line back in Season 8. This contest is not one at all. As long as Scotty does not do something really stupid next Tuesday he wins.