Skip to main content

My FCS Top 25, 10/31/2011

Below the flip, see my Top 25 for this week.
1: North Dakota State Bison
2: Lehigh Mountain Hawks
3: Maine Black Bears
4: Appalachian State Mountaineers
5: Montana State Bobcats
6: Sam Houston State Bearkats
7: Montana Grizzlies
8: Georgia Southern Eagles
9: Northern Iowa Panthers
10: Wofford Terriers
11: New Hampshire Wildcats
12: Harvard Crimson
13: Old Dominion Monarchs
14: Liberty Flames
15: Brown Bears
16: James Madison Dukes
17: Albany Great Danes
18: Central Arkansas Bears
19: Norfolk State Spartans
20: Towson Tigers
21: Cal Poly Mustangs
22: Georgetown Hoyas
23: Stony Brook Seawolves
24: Duquesne Dukes
25: Jacksonville Dolphins

Three quick hits about my Top 25:

* I cannot recall a poll where my picks diverge so greatly from the ones released by the Sports Network and the Coaches' Poll.

I literally have eight teams not included the Sports Network poll, and nine - nine! - teams different than the Coaches.

Part of the reason this is the case is that I refuse to put four loss teams in my poll at this point when there are still many quality teams available with three losses or fewer.

I can't see in good conscience, for example, why anybody on God's Green Earth would put 4-4 William & Mary  in the Top 25 at this point.  The Tribe have only beaten three Division I opponents, including 1-8 Villanova and 1-7 VMI!  While their home win over New Hampshire was great, it's hard to see it as anything but an aberration.

And 5-4 Delaware at No. 16?  Please.  The Hens have only 4 Division I wins, and while some might think wins over Towson, William & Mary and UMass make Delaware worthy of a national ranking, I sure as heck do not. Only 6-2 Towson, at No. 20, makes my Top 25 at all.

I cannot see why anyone would, say, deny 7-2 Georgetown, 6-2 Norfolk State, a Top 25 ranking over a 4-4 team with 3 D-I wins.  While critics will reflexively critique them by saying they play in 'weak conferences', the fact remains that they've beaten the teams on their schedule, and William & Mary have not.  And - news flash - the Hoyas and Spartans have played harder opponents than D-II New Haven, VMI and Villanova.

* There is simply a lot of strangeness at the bottom of the Top 25 polls that defy any real logic.

How does 5-3 (3-0) Cal Poly stay out of both Top 25s - yet leaguemates 5-3 North Dakota and 5-4 South Dakota, with significantly weaker schedules, remain ranked?  I corrected this major error by putting the Mustangs in my Top 25 - but other pollsters didn't bother, or didn't care.

How does any team in the OVC make Top 25 consideration at this point?  All three OVC title contenders have no true quality wins (5-2 Tennessee Tech, 5-3 Jacksonville State, 5-3 Eastern Kentucky) and all have at least one questionable loss (to Tennessee State, Chattanooga, and Austin Peay respectively).  Do people just like Jacksonville, Alabama, and throw them in there for that reason?

A better question might be: what has the OVC or second-tier Great West teams done to deserve consideration over, say, NEC squads?

While 6-2 Albany lost an early overtime game to a full-strength Colgate squad and a nationally-ranked Maine team, they've ripped off six impressive double-digit wins, against an all-Division-I schedule.  And 7-2 Duquesne, after a opening season loss to 4-4 Bucknell and a defeat against Albany, have ripped through the rest of their NEC schedule as well.

What's strange is that pollsters automatically discount the NEC, saying their "schedule is bad", but don't similarly discount, say, Tennessee Tech's schedule because they've scheduled NAIA Maryville.

That's because they also have FBS Iowa on the schedule - that walloped them 56-3.

There seems to be this fallacy out there these days that if your team faces an FBS opponent, they must be "good", and if they don't, they must have a "weak schedule".  But plenty of terrible FCS teams face FBS squads, and there are some great FCS teams that don't schedule FBS teams.

Yet some folks, apparently, are so dazzled at seeing Iowa, Idaho, or Kentucky, that they seem to forget that the rest of their schedule is not all that strong.

A team like Albany is really good - and they deserve to be there a lot more than North Dakota, who scheduled three sub-D-I teams this year.

* You know who a real diamond in the rough might be in the coming weeks?  5-3 Stony Brook, whom I put into my poll this week at No. 23.

People may not realize it, but two of their two losses came to two FBS opponents - UTEP and Buffalo - and the Seawolves darn near upset the Miners, taking them to overtime.

Their last loss - to 6-1 Brown - wasn't exactly chopped liver, either.

They haven't proven themselves against a really good team yet - though they drilled 4-4 Coastal Carolina this weekend, 42-0 - but with a showdown against No.14 Liberty to close out the year, they'll get their chance to prove themselves, and possibly even get the programs' first FCS postseason bid.

It's no secret I like to rank hot teams, no matter where they're from, and 5-3 Stony Brook fits the bill.  That season-ending clash could be an awfully interesting one at the end of the year.

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.