[piotrm]

ya, the method would have to be modified to get rid of the popularity issues; perhaps instead of letting people list their top # of teams; each one would be given a few teams from their area and they would have to rank them in a few categories; it would have to be made so that each team is shown the exact same number of times for rankings; this would certainly be harder to do but would possibly get rid of the popularity issue

or another way would be to provide a popularity rating alongside the method you people mentioned; perhaps make the scorers list the top few most peopular teams in their opinion; afterwards this popularity ranking would be normalized (flattened) with the team rankings being modified proprtionally to this popularity normalization

good luck