Revisionist Idol - Season 1

This is a cool idea asking blog readers/Idol fans to re-imagine the results of past season of American Idol. Would your favorite contestant still win? Who made it too far or not far enough? Season 1 was pretty obvious (see below) but the what about the other seasons?

Leave a comment with your opinion on how Season 2 SHOULD'VE gone down.

Via USA Today's 'Idol Chatter' blog.

1. (and still champion) Kelly Clarkson (1st): Kelly didn't win in a landslide -- it was a pretty tight battle -- but the result was clear. I've got to go along with this verdict -- Kelly has done the franchise proud, and I don't know that anyone else in this crop could have come close to equaling her subsequent achievements.

2. Tamyra Gray (4th): Clearly the feeling is that Tamyra got robbed by the original voters. She was far and away the No. 2 vote-getter in this poll, a lot closer to Kelly than to the No. 3 finisher. As a postscript to the interesting but perhaps overheated discussion that cropped up about her post-Idol accomplishments, maybe she did make the right decision in gravitating toward acting and songwriting, but it would have been nice to have seen what she could have done as a singer with a big push (rather than an album that snuck out well over a year after her Idol season concluded).

3. Justin Guarini (2nd): Justin's fast fade from the public eye (aided and abetted by the From Justin to Kelly movie, which strangely didn't seem to affect Kelly's image at all, and the corporate neglect suffered by his first album) is reflected in his loss of standing retrospectively. He was the clear No. 3 choice, but was way behind Tamyra in the voting, and only a couple of people cared enough to vote him No. 1.

4. Christina Christian (6th): Substantial support for Christina, who on this vote joins Tamyra in what could be, by the time this exercise is complete, a substantial subset of African-American female singers who people now feel got a raw deal from the voters at the time. It'll be interesting to see where Kimberley Locke, Trenyce, Jennifer Hudson, La Toya London, Nadia Turner, Vonzell Solomon and others wind up in the revisionist vote.

5. RJ Helton (5th): A bit of a surprise, not that he equaled his actual finish but that he beat real-life third-place finisher Nikki McKibbin to do it (by the slimmest margin between any two finalists). I found RJ inoffensive if bland, but a superior singer to Nikki, so I was pleased to see this result.

6. Nikki McKibbin (3rd): Biggest gap between actual finish and revised vote, and well-deserved if you ask me -- I always thought Nikki was overrated, and her claim as a "rock chick" quite dubious -- Gina Glocksen could probably sing rings around her.
7. Ryan Starr (7th): Fairly substantial gap between Nikki and Ryan, who struck me as substantially more bogus than Nikki -- although she was arguably better than her piano-climbing male namesake on Rockstar: Supernova. She was kind of the Haley Scarnato of her day (in terms of teenage boy appeal), but less wholesome.
8. E. Jay Day (9th): E Jay carves out a small triumph by getting voted a notch higher than his actual finish. Having zero memory of his singing ability, I can't comment as to the merits of this result.
9. A.J. Gil (8th): The boy-band-esque A.J. was the victim of E. Jay's success, falling to ninth in the revisionist standings. No great loss, if I recall.
10. Jim Verraros (10th): And as it was in the beginning, so shall it be for eternity (or until the next poll comes around). Coming out didn't gain Jim a lot of retroactive support, it appears.