Skip to main content

My FCS Top 25, 9/12/2011


Below the flip, see my Top 25 for this week.  (more)

1: Georgia Southern Eagles
2: Northern Iowa Panthers
3: William & Mary Tribe
4: Richmond Spiders
5: North Dakota State Bison
6: Wofford Terriers
7: Appalachian State Mountaineers
8: New Hampshire Wildcats
9: Montana State Bobcats
10: Eastern Washington Eagles
11: Montana Grizzlies
12: South Carolina State Bulldogs
13: Lehigh Mountain Hawks
14: Delaware Fightin' Blue Hens
15: Chattanooga Mocs
16: Pennsylvania Quakers
17: Stephen F. Austin Lumberjacks
18: Southern Illinois Salukis
19: Liberty Flames
20: South Dakota Coyotes
21: James Madison Dukes
22: Jacksonville State Gamecocks
23: Yale Bulldogs
24: Central Arkansas Bears
25: McNeese State Cowboys

Three quick hits about my Top 25:

1.  Could there have been a more disappointing, inexplicable loss than Eastern Washington's this weekend?  The loss in Week One to the Huskies of the Pac Ten was one thing: the loss to the transitional Sough Dakota Coyotes, in a game that wasn't even that close, was quite another.  Another loss this weekend at Montana, and you can make a great case of dropping them out of the Top 25 altogether.

2. Don't look now, but South Carolina State's win over Bethune-Cookman was a real show-me victory, on the road, at a place which is very tough to play, against a team that is unquestionably one of the class of the MEAC.  These Bulldogs are for real, and they well deserve a ranking up there at 12.  Their defensive-minded win really impressed me.

3. With Colgate's blowout loss to Holy Cross this weekend, I could have picked Holy Cross to make my Top 25 - but I'm still reserving judgement on the Crusaders.  Are they that good - or is Colgate that deficient in key areas?  We'll know better about Holy Cross when they face Harvard this weekend.  Instead of the Crusaders, I picked another Ivy  team - Yale - that looks and feels like a team that's going to pull it all together this year and finally get over that Ivy League title hump.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How The Ivy League Is Able To Break the NCAA's Scholarship Limits and Still Consider Themselves FCS

By now you've seen the results.  In 2018, the Ivy League has taken the FCS by storm. Perhaps it was Penn's 30-10 defeat of Lehigh a couple of weeks ago .  Or maybe it was Princeton's 50-9 drubbing of another team that made the FCS Playoffs last year, Monmouth.  Or maybe it was Yale's shockingly dominant 35-14 win over nationally-ranked Maine last weekend. The Ivy League has gone an astounding 12-4 so far in out-of-conference play, many of those wins coming against the Patriot League. But it's not just against the Patriot League where the Ivy League has excelled.  Every Ivy League school has at least one out-of-conference victory, which is remarkable since it is only three games into their football season.  The four losses - Rhode Island over Harvard, Holy Cross over Yale, Delaware over Cornell, and Cal Poly over Brown - were either close losses that could have gone either way or expected blowouts of teams picked to be at the bottom of the Ivy League. W

Made-Up Midseason Grades for Lehigh Football

 We are now officially midway through the 2023 Lehigh football season.  The Mountain Hawks sit at 1-5 overall, and 0-1 in the Patriot League. I thought I'd go ahead and make up some midseason grades, and set some "fan goals" for the second half. The 2023 Mountain Hawks were picked to finish fifth in the seven team Patriot League.  In order to meet or exceed that expectation, they'll probably have to go at least 3-2 the rest of the way in conference play.  Their remaining games are vs. Georgetown, at Bucknell, vs. Holy Cross, at Colgate, and vs. Lafayette in The Rivalry. Can they do it? Culture Changing: B+ .  I was there in the Bronx last week after the tough 38-35 defeat to Fordham, and there wasn't a single player emerging from the locker room that looked like they didn't care.  Every face was glum.  They didn't even seem sad.  More frustrated and angry. That may seem normal, considering the agonizing way the Mountain Hawks lost, but it was a marked chan

Fifteen Guys Who Might be Lehigh's Next Football Coach (and Five More)

If you've been following my Twitter account, you might have caught some "possibilities" as Lehigh's next head football coach like Lou Holtz, Brett Favre and Bo Pelini .  The chance that any of those three guys actually are offered and accept the Lehigh head coaching position are somewhere between zero and zero.  (The full list of my Twitter "possibilities" are all on this thread on the Lehigh Sports Forum .) However the actual Lehigh head football coaching search is well underway, with real names and real possibilities. I've come up with a list of fifteen possible names, some which I've heard whispered as candidates, others which might be good fits at Lehigh for a variety of reasons. UPDATE: I have found five more names of possible head coaches that I am adding to this list below. Who are the twenty people?  Here they are, in alphabetical order.