The Emmy, by far, is the most difficult showbiz award to predict. Since the Oscar, Grammy, Tony and Golden Globe are determined by a popular vote, a prognosticator can sometimes just follow the winds of popular sentiment and trip over the right answers. But that darn Emmy — she makes you fall flat on your face over the wrong answer too often. Like this year — the worst one ever!

Normally, about three-quarters of the winners line up with the oomph of the sample episodes submitted to jurors viewing them at home (watching two per nominee for best series and supporting acting and one for lead acting). Normally. But not this year.

Denis Leary ("Rescue Me") and Christopher Meloni ("Law & Order: Special Victims Unit") gave far more dynamic performances on their screeners than Kiefer Sutherland ("24"), winner of best drama actor. Megan Mullally gave one of the weakest perfs among the five gals up for best supporting comedy actress (she handed in the finale of "Will & Grace"), clobbering the one contender whose performance on her Emmy reel towered over all rivals: Jaime Pressly ("My Name Is Earl").

The vast majority of pundits, "pro" and amateur, I know who watched the comedy-actress screeners thought the race was a tight one between Lisa Kudrow ("The Comeback") and Jane Kaczmarek ("Malcolm in the Middle"). Winner Julia Louis-Dreyfus' submission was OK, but not impressive in performance terms, not packed with the emotional grandstanding that usually wins Emmys.

Several notable Emmy seers predicted "24" to prevail as best drama series — I know, I know — but I didn't take it seriously because Hollywood voters don't usually take TV shows or films in the thriller genre seriously.

So what the heck happened? Look at the lousy prediction score I had (3 out of 12 categories) and how poorly our racetrack odds did (2 out of 12). Out of the 8 "pro" pundits we had forecasting the Emmys, the highest score was 5. How sad, eh? None of us foresaw the victories by Sutherland, best drama actress Marika Hargitay ("Law & Order: Special Victims Unit") or best actor in a TV film/mini Andre Braugher ("Thief"). All of our pundits were shrewd Emmy gurus who watched the episode submissions. How could we have been so far off?

This year we witnessed a drastic and jarring disconnect between Emmy winners and episodes, two elements that are supposed to be related and usually do line up. That turned out fine for the TV academy because winners were worthy rivals with high Cool Quotients like Kiefer and Julia. But these results aren't consistent with past Emmy wins. That scares the bee's wax about of "pro" predictors like me, forcing us to wonder: What does this tell us about trying to predict future Emmys?

To probe possible answers to these befuddling mysteries, I turned to this website's most trusty Emmy expert: our forums moderator "Boomer" (Chris Beachum). Listen to our podcast chat — CLICK HERE! I think you'll be intrigued. We come up with some interesting theories about how, for example, the "cool" contender for comedy actress won (Julia), but not the "cooler than cool" nominee for comedy actor (Steve Carell, "The Office"). Our conclusion: while Julia's episode wasn't a barn-burner, it was still quite good. By comparison, Steve's was lame in every respect (he burns his foot on his George Foreman grill). We don't even hear a yelp. He's so laid back that it's hard to see any performance. Even more important perhaps: Julia's character was endearingly sympathetic, even empathetic. Steve portrays a beastly office boss and succeeds at making TV viewers — and Emmy voters, unfortunately — loathe him as much as his employees.