American Idol Season 11 Top 8 Betting Odds

Now that Heejun Han has left the American Idol mansion, we are down to the Top 8, 4 guys and 4 gals. And that means new betting odds! And after last evening and a bottom three with two new members (Hollie Cavanagh and Skylar Laine), that seems to have changed the betting odds for the whole competition. I believe the fact that the two ladies accompanied Heejun in the Bottom 3 (without DeAndre Brackensick or Joshua Ledet), also hurt the leading lady, Jessica Sanchez. Up until this time, Jessica had always been the lowest odds to win, but now she has fallen slightly behind Phillip Phillips, both on Bovada and on Pinnacle. The fact that all the gals except for Jessica have been in the Bottom 3 now at least once shows that gals do not have as strong of voting fans as the guys. So now when I average the odds from the two sites, Phillip is the odds on favorite to win with Jessica narrowly behind him.

The big mover this week is Elise who is now pretty even with Skylar and Hollie in their odds to win the whole thing. Joshua has therefore moved into the 4th lowest odds position, but with odds of 9:1 and 10.25:1 he is still far behind the Top 3 (Phillip, Jessica, Colton). The last remaining long shot (with Heejun gone and Elise moving up the ranks) is DeAndre who is a 50:1 long shot on Bovada and a 71:1 long shot on Pinnacle. I thought his not being in the Bottom 3 would help him out, but apparently it has not!

With Erika and now Heejun leaving the competition, I also noticed they were the two oldest contestants not named Elise in the Top 10. So now if we chart the ages of the Top 8, Elise definitely stands alone by herself as the only person over 21:

I find it amusing that next week the theme will be the music of the 80's and Elise is the only one who was even alive during the 80's being born in July of 1983. Heejun had actually been born in April 1989 (turning 23 next month), but now even he is gone. The second oldest contestant left is now Phillip who was born in September 1990.

Tough Night to Predict the Bottom Three!

With a fairly balanced American Idol show this evening and nobody really stinking it up, it becomes a little tougher to decide who will be in the bottom three and who will be leaving us tomorrow. From the preliminary raw scores on DialIdol and the opinion poll on Idol Chatter, I am guessing Heejun Han and DeAndre Brackensick will likely be in the bottom 3 again with one of them going home. But who will be the third person with them? The Idol Chatter opinion poll has Hollie Cavanagh as the third most likely to be going home, and with the judges' less than flattering comments tonight she may see her first appearance in the Bottom 3. However, I can also possibly see Joshua Ledet making a return appearance to the Bottom 3 since his performance this week was not a "standout" and he had to perform not only before Elise Testone, but also before the Skylar, Hollie, Jessica "Madonna" trio. He is the third from the bottom on Dial Idol raw votes.

It is easy to pick a few who should definitely NOT be in the bottom 3:
1) Elise Testone since she went last and performed a well-known upbeat song and performed it well.
2) Phillip Phillips because he is Phillip and performed another upbeat Dave Matthews like rocking number.
3) Jessica Sanchez because she is Jessica and even if a catastophe happened and she was voted off the judges would definitely use the save on her (and Jimmy Iovine will sign her regardless of what happens on the show.)

I would put Colton Dixon there as #4 sure bet, but he did go first and I wonder if his fan support is as large as Phillip's and/or Jessica's. He is probably safe too, and you also know the judges would use their save on him if disaster befell him.

So that leaves Skylar Laine as possibly being the third option along with Joshua and Hollie as the final member (with Heejun and DeAndre) in the Bottom 3. In the unlikely event that Hollie, Skylar or Joshua ended up being the bottom vote receiver and possibly eliminated, I am not sure if the judges would use their save on one of them (wanting to save it for Jessica, Phillip or Colton, perhaps). I do not think they will use the save on either Heejun or DeAndre for sure. I am pretty sure Elise is safe this week, but in a couple more weeks she may not be, and I will be curious if the judges would save her when there are 7 or 6 people left.

Three Idols on Country Radio Lead Album Sales

BillBoard album ranking, blue = "Stronger", orange = "Clear As Day"

 This week the top 3 album selling Idol alums all have songs on country radio, even if the leader actually is not a country singer! Of course, I mean Kelly Clarkson with "Stronger" who keeps her sales steady at 17K (683K total, BB #19). Even though she has the #1 song on both the Pop Top 40 and Hot AC charts, she even is on country radio with a new version of "Mr. Know It All". Kelly is everywhere.  Since the first week of January "Stronger" has remained in the Top 25 of the BillBoard chart and has stayed there ever since.

The latest Idol debut and one with the #2 country album in the country is a guy I never pegged as country from his appearance on Season 9, Casey James. His self-titled album debuts with sales of 14K, as his lead single "Let's Don't Call It A Night" continues a slow move up the country singles chart, closing in on the Top 20. As his single continues to get more airplay he may be able to increase album sales, but I had hoped to see him as possibly the top seller out of Season 9. That may still happen if he can score a big radio hit out of one of his album tracks.

"Clear As Day" weekly sales in thousands

The third highest Idol album seller (and the first time in a long time it has not been him and Kelly as #1 and #2) is Scotty McCreery, with "Clear As Day" selling 6K more to bring his total sales to 980K (BB #67). However, with an upcoming appearance on American Idol tomorrow and another on the ACM Awards on Sunday, I am guessing his sales will pop back up for the following week. Although this week again marks his lowest weekly sales for his album, since his sales will likely go up the next couple weeks, this is probably the low point for his first 6 months since release. Six straight months in the BillBoard Top 75, the Country Top 15 and with sales of over 6K for every single week. I do not think the folks at Interscope are disappointed!

It sounds like the big month this Spring for American Idol albums to be released is May when Carrie Underwood ("Blown Away" May 1), then Adam Lambert ("Trespassing" May 15) then Haley Reinhart ("Listen Up!" May 22) all release their albums. That will be a lot of album sales to track!

American Idol Betting Odds - March 26, 2012

Once again both Bovada and Pinnacle Sports have their betting odds on the nine remaining contestants on Season 11 of American Idol available online, and there are some interesting changes from last week. Now Bovada puts Phillip Phillips as the favorite over Jessica Sanchez, but just barely (9/4 odds versus 5/2 odds). Pinnacle, however, still has Jessica as their top favorite with 2.75 odds versus 3.25 for Phillip. The best gainer from last week was Colton Dixon who is now squarely the 3rd favorite after Jessica and Phillip with odds of 9/2 and 5.85 after his "Piano Man" performance last week. Hollie Cavanagh, Skylar Laine and Joshua Ledet are now all in the middle of the pack with odds of 13/2 to 9/1 on Bovada and all tied at 10.0 on Pinnacle. Elise Testone now improved to have the lowest odds of the 3 "long shots" of winning with odds of 40 and 42.86 on the two sites. After his unsual Wednesday performance, Heejun Han fell from being a mid pack contestant to being a long shot now with odds of 30 on Bovada but 67.48 on Pinnacle. And now the contestant with the highest odds is DeAndre Brackensick who is a 40:1 long shot on Bovada and an impressive 86:1 long shot on Pinnacle. I have averaged the odds from the two sites together and rebuilt my graph of the changing odds for the final 9 contestants below:

American Idol Album Sales - Kelly Remains 'Stronger', Daughtry Jumps, Scotty and Lauren Drop

This week's American Idol sales numbers were good if you were Kelly Clarkson or Chris Daughtry, but not as great otherwise. Kelly's 'Stronger' album saw steady sales from last week, so with 16K in sales, she is two thirds of the way to a million at 666K and #16 on the BillBoard chart. Chris Daughtry saw a nice jump after his performance on the show last week, jumping 45% to 6K for the week and putting his total sales at 407K (#72 on the chart) Scotty McCreery's 'Clear As Day' may have dropped out of the Top 50 again (#62), but his sales actually topped Daughtry at 7K, putting McCreery only 25K from hitting a million scanned sales. And his 7K number was his worst sales number ever, which is actually pretty impressive for an album out almost a half a year. He has remained in the Top 50 all but 3 weeks, so his almost six months chart run has been pretty incredible. It looks like Kelly will actually be able to stay within the Top 50 for her first full six months, but then again she is Kelly Clarkson!

 BillBoard Ranking, orange = 'Clear As Day', blue = 'Stronger'

Lauren Alaina saw her 'Wildflower' album sales drop off quite a bit since she had the big boost from performing on the show two weeks ago. Still she hangs on within the Top 200 at #193 with another 3K in sales to put her total at 260K. This week Casey James from Season 9 has released his new self-titled album and HitsDailyDouble is estimating 12K to 15K for his first week sales. I was hoping higher numbers for his release, but it has been 2 years since he was on the show. Haley Reinhart showed up for a visit on last night's performance show and should be performing herself on the results show tonight. I will be curious to see how well her album does on its release.

Heejun Han Looks In Trouble... But Is He?

After last night's American Idol performances I had to check my three favorite "after Idol" sites to see what kind of numbers were appearing for the Top 10 contestants. The numbers do not look good for Heejun Han as he scores the lowest total raw vote counts on DialIdol, the top guess as the one going home on Idol Chatter (by a wide margin over DeAndre Brackensick), and once again the lowest overall web rating on WhatNotToSing.com. But he was in almost the same position last week and he was not even in the Bottom 3! In fact if you think back over the evening he still has one of the most memorable and news worthy performances of the evening even though his vocal performance may have been the worst one of all. Personally, I do not think he is going home tomorrow night, and my guess would be DeAndre, Erika or Elise to be the one leaving. I think it is better to be a bad but memorable singer, than to be solid vocally but not overly memorable of a performer. We shall see tomorrow night!

American Idol Betting Odds March 19 : Two Sources

I checked today and both Pinnacle Sports and Bovada have updated their betting odds on American Idol contestants, and the two sites have slightly different odds and rankings. Both sites have Jessica Sanchez barely leading Phillip Phillips as the favorite to win, but Pinnacle has Joshua Ledet narrowly leading Hollie Cavanagh in odds to win, although they are close on both sites (Bovada has Hollie at 5:1 and Joshua at 11:2, and Pinnacle has Joshua at 6.06:1 and Hollie at 6:76:1.) Both sites have Skylar Laine next and then Colton Dixon, but for the 4 long shots they also diverge. Pinnacle has Heejun Han as the lowest odds of the four remaining contestants at 38:39:1 whereas Bovada has him tied with Elise Testone and DeAndre Brackensick at 30:1 odds. Bovada has Erika Van Pelt with the highest odds at 50:1, where Pinnacle has both her and Elisa tied at 51.52:1 odds. For my graph below I averaged the numbers from both betting sites for my March 19 bars on the graph.

Another interesting graph to show for the Top 10 along with the betting odds is the age distribution of the remaining contestants:

Among the ladies there is one 16 year old, two 18 year olds, one at 26 and one at 28. And the top 3 of the ladies with the lowest betting odds? Yes, the three young ones. The two oldest females Elise (26) and Erika (28) are also the two contestants with the highest betting odds out there. The guys, interestingly are all spread pretty evenly from 17 (DeAndre) to 22 (Heejun), but none are 23 or older. If Shannon Magrane had not been eliminated last week and it had been either Erika or Elise, the graph would look even more like "the cheese stands alone", with a single older female on the right side. Luckily for now Elise and Erika have each other to help represent the over 22 crowd! So right now the most likely winner this year is either a 16 or 18 year old girl or a 19 to 21 year old guy.

American Idol Top 10 Betting Odds and More!

Another day, another updated betting odds list for American Idol contestants! With Shannon Magrane being eliminated last night we are now down to the Top 10 who will go on tour, a nice even 5 gals and 5 girls. But one thing I noticed about the 3 contestants who are no longer with us from the Top 13 ... they were the 3 tallest people! Jermaine Jones,  Jeremy Rosado and Shannon were the three I decided were the Top 3 in height back at the beginning of March and now they are all gone. Is there some American Idol height discrimination happening here? The three short ladies have never been in the bottom 3 in votes, and the 2 other taller ladies, Erika Van Pelt and Elise Testone have both been in the Bottom 3 twice. This is definitely the year of the "short girl".

Now I have posted my latest bar graph of the changing trend in betting odds of the Top 10, and we can see that Joshua has now moved to be the 3rd top favorite behind Jessica Sanchez and Phillip Phillips. Colton Dixon and Skylar Laine have seen their odds stay pretty stable, but Heejun Han's continue to get worse. Now that he is for sure going on the tour I wonder if people will still keep voting for him since he really is not that great of a singer. The other interesting fact to note is that DeAndre Brackensick, Elise Testone and Erika Van Pelt are all almost died for long shot status with odds of about 41:1. One of the three of them is bound to be leaving next week since Heejun seems to have a lot more fan support than any of those three (Heejun has still never been in the Bottom 3.) It will be interesting to see if Heejun can outlast all three of them. Among the favorites, it will be interesting to see if Joshua Ledet and Hollie Cavanagh can continue to improve their odds against Phillip and Jessica who seem to be a lock as #1 and #2 as of right now. Of course, at this point last season it seemed like Pia Toscano was a lock to be in the Top 3, so do not get complacent if you are a Jessica or Phillip fan!

American Idol Season 11 ("Jermaine-Less") Betting Odds

I found updated American Idol betting odds with Jermaine removed on the Pinnacle site so I could update my running chart of the odds there. I was also curious how last night's performance round would change the odds of people, specifically those who did well (Joshua, Hollie) and others who did not (Jessica, Heejun)

Jessica did not lose her front runner status, but her odds to win did increase slightly, as did Phillip's. Hollie's odds did improve moving her in front of Skylar, and Joshua also improved significantly among favorites, practically tied with Colton now as the 5th highest favorite to win. Heejun did drop back as his odds soared to 26.29:1 making him a pretty steep long shot. Now there are six favorites with odds of about 10:1 or less, and five long shots with odds or 25:1 or higher. It will be a difficult guess to see which of the bottom five there gets eliminated next to not make it to the tour. I am not sure why Deandre saw his odds jump so much, but that is not a good sign!

Lauren Alaina Album Sales Jump, Kelly Clarkson and Scotty McCreery Keep on Selling

BillBoard 200 Ranking: orange = "Clear As Day", blue = "Stronger"

Wow, it is Spring Break at our university so I was taking the day away from my computer, but one of my blog followers wanted the weekly album sales chart, and who was I to refuse a faithful follower? Plus it was a good week for most of all the American Idol contestants (for ones not named Jermaine Jones) and their album sales so why not share? The two biggest sellers of late, Kelly Clarkson and Scotty McCreery saw only small sales drops this week, Kelly selling 16K copies of "Stronger" to reach 650K total (#16 on the BillBoard 200) and Scotty with another another 9K in sales of "Clear As Day" to reach 967K (#39). Note that both of them improved their BillBoard ranking quite significantly from last week as other albums on the charts did not hold up as strongly. But the big gainer this week after her American Idol performance was Lauren Alaina, who saw her "Wildflower" sales surge 34%, selling 4,000 copies to put her total sales at 258K and placing her #116 on the chart.

American Idol Top 11 - Who Is Going Home Tomorrow?

Now that Jermaine has been disqualified, the big question becomes who will be eliminated tomorrow to reduce the group to the Top 10 who get to go on tour. If you look at the WhatNotToSing.com ratings and the decision of the fans on Idol Chatter, you would think Heejun would be the one to leave, but I am not so sure.

Even though the majority of online fans think he performed worst and is the one most likely to go home, he does still have a ton of Twitter followers, and he had never been among the bottom vote receivers before. So his fan base may be able to save him. Let's look at the raw numbers on DialIdol, here sorted by busy signals:

Even though Heejun has one of the lowest number of busy signals (14 out of his 3.1K votes), the bottom line is he still has enough power voters to cast 3.1K votes for him tonight via DialIdol, far more than Elise, Shannon, Skylar or Joshua. Hopefully Joshua has plenty of phone dialing, texting and Facebook voters to vote for him, since he did perform pretty well tonight but does not have many DialIdol voters! I could see Shannon or Elise possibly being in trouble instead of Heejun. We know from last week Elise did not have that many votes and who is to say she picked up all that many more this week. Remember the votes are just as much about popularity and fans as it is about performance!

American Idol Betting Odds Top 12 - The Day After Elimination

I was curious if any of the betting sites had removed Jeremy yet and gave us some new betting odd numbers, and sure enough Pinnacle Sports has updated their American Idol Season 11 odds to win page. Luckily I also captured the numbers from the beginning of the week so I can make some cool comparisons! I generated a ranked list of the Top 12 based on todays odds and it shows some interesting things:

The two with the lowest betting odds remain the same (Jessica and Phillip) but that is when things start to diverge quite a bit. On Pinnacle their 3rd lowest odds were on Elise on Monday, but after her near elimination her odds have soared from 9.0 to 34.0, making her the second highest long shot behind Jermaine. Skylar and Colton had been tied with the 4th lowest odds before (9.5)  and Skylar's had dropped a little to 7.5 whereas Colton's has increased slightly to 12.0. Meanwhile Hollie's odds lowered from 12.11 to 10.0 giving her the 4th lowest betting odds now. So now 3 of the 4 contestants with the lowest betting odds (i.e. the ones believed to be most likely to win) are the "little ladies with the big voices". We have not seen that on American Idol for a while! The most consistent odds belong to Heejun who sees his odds increase hardly at all from 14.45 to 14.5 keeping his as the 6th lowest odds. Joshua had been about even with Heejun earlier (14.7) , but after being a bottom 3 vote getter his odds increased a bit more to 18.0 putting him in the 7th position. DeAndre saw the biggest drop in his odds, as he was a wildcard before, but ended up in the top 4 guys this week. In 8th position his odds dropped from 31.75 to 26, still pretty high odds, but still an improvement. Shannon after being placed in the bottom 3 last night, however, saw her odds jump the other way, shooting up from 15.79 on Monday to 29 today. Erika's also dropped a little from 27.86 to 31. And the highest odds belong to Jermaine (who was also Pinnacle's long shot on Monday) jumping from 36 to 76, making a winning bet on him worth quite a bit!

The way they separated out the bottom 3 for the guys and gals separately last night gave us a lot more information on the voting than we have seen in the past. We can see clear divisions within each gender, but it is difficult to guess how the voting numbers compare between the two genders. For both the gals and guys we now have a definitely top 3: Jessica, Skylar and Hollie for the ladies and Phillip, Colton and Heejun for the guys. Even though DeAndre was not in the bottom 3 last night, we know he was not in the Top 5 the week before (whereas Joshua and Jermaine were) so we can now group those three together. Shannon and Elise were Top 5 ladies from last week but were voted in the bottom 3 this week, so they along with Erika form the "second tier" amongst the ladies. I wonder if the fact that Joshua and Erika were first removed to "safety" means they were the top vote getters of the bottom 3. They never said that for sure so I would not definitely bet on it.

Luckily last season demonstrates things can always change, as Pia held the lowest odds up until the week she was surprisingly eliminated, and Haley had some of the highest betting odds early on, yet, ended up coming in 3rd place. Scotty did remain among the top 3 lowest betting odds all season long too, though, so an early front runner can indeed win it all in the end. I will just have to track the numbers and see what happens!  

"Stronger" Drops Out of BillBoard Top 20 - Kelly Can Blame Whitney Too!

BillBoard 200 Rank, orange = "Clear As Day", blue = "Stronger"

With the excitement of a new season of American Idol I almost forget to post my latest chart of current Idol album sales. After nine straight weeks back in the BillBoard Top 20, Kelly Clarkson's "Stronger" drops to #24. If you remove the 5 Whitney Houston albums ahead of her, however, she would still be at #19. Kelly sold 19K more albums this week to bring her total to 633K. Scotty McCreery actually saw a slight increase, posting his weekly sales of 10K. Last week had been his lowest sales week ever at 9K on his 21st week, but with rounding this week he goes back up to the 10K level, even if his BillBoard rank slips slightly to #64. "Clear As Day" also breaks the 950K limit and is just a few weeks away from an official million in sales.

"Clear As Day" weekly sales in thousands

Daughtry's "Break the Spell" is the only other Idol album in the BillBoard 200 at #110 with sales of 5K (396K total.) He keeps reaching closer to 400K but will have to wait until next week to hit that number. Lauren Alaina's "Wildflower" has broken the 250K level (254K with 3K in sales this week) and Kelly Pickler's "100 Proof" sold another 2K to reach 57K total.

American Idol Top 13 Predictions Using DialIdol and WhatNotToSing

I thoroughly enjoyed last night's American Idol episode with the ladies definitely showing some good versatility and variety performing Whitney Houston songs. I have been listening to quite a bit of Whitney lately myself (reliving my youthful years fondly). Some of the gals did an excellent job with their performances, and yes, it was pretty obvious which ones did well... the short ones! Whitney was actually not so short but for some reason the three tiniest females delivered the best performances of the night (Jessica, Hollie, Skylar.) But what is really more important to figure out is not who is staying, but who might be leaving tonight. For that I will look at the data. If you look at last week's DialIdol scores, they were actually not very useful:

There were just too many contestants with hardly anybody using DialIdol for them anymore so the scores cannot predict very much any more. You have to look at the raw numbers instead to see who has the fans willing to tie up their land phone line for hours dialing for their favorites:

If you look at last weeks raw numbers, the Top 5 ladies were among the top 6 in raw votes and the top 5 guys were also among the top 6 vote getters for them. The only two that snuck in the top 6 were Jen Hirsh and Reed Grimm, both of which interestingly were picked as possible wild cards last week (although neither made it through.) With that knowledge, let us look at the raw numbers for this week:

The first thing I noticed is that last week there were more votes for the guys (29K vs 24K) , but this week there were more votes for the ladies (19K vs 15k). I also noticed there were some big week to week changes for some contestants both in a good way and in a bad way. The best news was for Erika who only received 2K in votes last week and received over 5K this week. Unfortunately there was a lot more bad news than good news, with several other contestants seeing big drops in raw votes, including Shannon (2.9K to 1.5K), Elise (2.4K to 1.7K), Jermaine (3.5K to 1.3K) and Heejun (3.2K to 1.4K). This week Heejun, Jermaine and DeAndre are all pretty close, so along with Jeremy (who had hardly any DialIdol votes both weeks) one of those 4 is likely to be one of the guys in trouble tonight, and it looks like it is between Elise and Shannon for the girls. If we look at the preliminary WhatNotToSing scores as of now they confirm those predictions:

So will it be Elise or Shannon or Jermaine or Jeremy tonight? I am thinking Heejun and DeAndre may be safe with their fan bases, but you never know for sure, since Heejun's DialIdol votes dropped in half and DeAndre's were pretty low both weeks (1.2K and 1.5K). We will have to wait until tonight to see for sure.

Updated American Idol Betting Odds, Combined and Graphed

 Now that I have a little more time I took a snapshot of the latest betting odds on the American Idol Top 13 as of today, March 5, 2012 from both Pinnacle Sports and Bovada. I then ranked all 13 contestants and added up their ranks from the two betting sites to see how they differ.

Bovada Sportsbook betting odds - 03/05/2012

Pinnacle Sports betting odds - 03/05/2012

 It is interesting to note both sites are sticking to their own favorites, Phillip fpr Bovada and Jessica for Pinnacle, so if you add the ranks together they are tied for the favorite. Bovada puts Jeremy at the longest shot to win at 30/1 whereas Pinnacle puts Jermaine at 36/1 with Jeremy at 35.87/1. The contestant with the largest difference in rank between the two sites (a difference of 4 positions) is Shannon (tied for #4 on Bovada, at #8 for Pinnacle) with both Skylar (tied for #7 on Bovada, #4 on Pinnacle) and Heejun 9 (#9 on Bovada, #6 on Pinnacle) seeing a difference of three. All the other contestants are within 1 or 2 positions of their ranks on the two sites.

First Betting Odds for American Idol Season 11

Now that the Top 13 are set we should start seeing some betting odds appear online. Sure enough at osga.com I found the opening odds for the remaining 13 contestants:

I found it interesting that the two odds placing sites listed are slightly different on their favorites and their rankings. Pinnacle puts Jessica Sanchez as the favorite, whereas Bovada has Phillip Phillips first. The names on the image above are ranked following the ordering on the Bovada odds (from the image at the time, it may have changed by now), some of which seem strange to me, especially Shannon as the second favorite, and Skylar and Elise being ranked so far down the line. The Pinnacle oddsmakers definitely tend to favorite the ladies better and Bovada prefers the guys more. Nonetheless, both sites place DeAndre, Erika and Jeremy (the wild cards) as the least likely to win, which makes a lot of sense. It will be interesting to see if one of them is the first to be eliminated this week.

American Idol Top 13 - The "Heights" of a New Season

Being the weird, nerdy guy that I am, the first thing that struck me when Jessica, and Hollie were awaiting their fate in the American Idol Top 13 last night was, "Wow, those are some short girls!" Especially since we also have Jermaine and Shannon in the Top 13, we have a very diverse group when it comes to heights! So that means it is now my time to try to rank the Top 13... in height! I was able to grab an image off the closing credits when they were all standing still (i.e. Heejun and Phillip were not dancing and jumping!) which makes the comparison pretty easy. Of course, most of the ladies are wearing heels, but I will leave their heels in the comparison, since when they are on stage they will be wearing heels anyway. Here are some more photos to help rank them:

So here goes my list:

1. Jermaine - of course, he is well over 6 feet tall
2. Shannon - in heels she is taller than anyone except Jermaine
3. Jeremy  - probably taller than Shannon in their stocking feet
4. Erika - in heels I think she looks taller than Colton, but he has that hair!
5. Colton - the top of his hair and Erika both come up to Jermaine's ears

Deandre, Joshua, Elise, Phillip and Heejun are next. I think Joshua is a little taller then Elise (sans hat) and Phillip is a little taller than Heejun. Heejun and Joshua are very close, but when both Heejun and then Joshua hug Shannon, Joshua has to raise his head more to clear Shannon's shoulder, where Heejun does not.

So I think Heejun is taller than Joshua. That means Phillip > Heejun > Joshua > Elise. Deandre also has a lot of hair which makes his height determination difficult. Luckily we can again use Shannon as the measuring device since she is so tall!

His chin seems even lower than Joshua's so I think he is shorter than him. I need a side by side of Deandre next to Elise. Comparing their chins to Shannon's armpit (sorry about staring at your armpit, Shannon) I think Deandre is a little bit taller. He is also definitely taller than the three most vertically challenged females, Jessica, Hollie and Skylar. Luckily I have some clips of those three together to rank them pretty easily. The time when Hollie and Jessica were standing next to Brielle and Hallie is when I first realized how tiny both of them are. With Ryan there, it makes Hallie look huge, when in reality she is not that overly tall! However you can tell that Jessica is taller than Hollie, and when Skylar hugs Hollie below it appear that Hollie is ever so slightly taller than Skylar (depending on their shoes of the day, of course!)

So now I can finish my rankings:

6. Phillip
7. Heejun
8. Joshua
9. Deandre
10. Elise
11. Jessica
12. Hollie
13. Skylar

And looking at this list, I can see the taller people perhaps being eliminated before the shorter ones! I cannot really see any of the tallest 4 contestants winning (although Colton may have a shot), and after Phillip I see the best shot of a winner coming from the four shortest females.

But in the meantime we can enjoy watching them try to have a duet between Jermaine and Hollie or between Shannon and Jessica. Get out the step stools!