Skip to main content

My Top 25 Ballot

Here's my Any Given Saturday ballot for this week.

1. Delaware
2. Eastern Washington
3. Western Kentucky
4. Harvard
5. North Dakota St
6. James Madison
7. Montana
8. Furman
9. New Hampshire
10. Cal Poly
11. Southern Illinois
12. Montana St
13. Lehigh
14. Northern Iowa
15. Hampton
16. William & Mary
17. South Carolina St
18. Penn
19. Western Carolina
20. Northwestern St
21. Appalachian St
22. Coastal Car
23. Grambling
24. Lafayette
25. Jacksonville St

Lafayette's still in your Top 25? Yes, they are. As disappointing as their loss was Saturday, I still believe they deserve to be in the Top 25. They are a good team, and we don't know how good Princeton is quite yet.

No UMass in your list? UMass is 2-1 and have beaten 2 awful teams, and lost to a mediocre team in Colgate. Hofstra hasn't beat any significant team, but they're 3-0. It pained me to take a fifth A-10 team, but I just didn't see any other good option except Hofstra. I don't belieive in Rhode Island yet, either.

Jacksonville State is 0-3, yet they're in your Top 25? Yep. They played I-A UAB tough, and were 2 plays away from beating Furman and Chattanooga. I think they will take the OVC this year and will get the autobid - and they will deserve that Top 25 ranking.

What's your love affair with Grambling? They're 2-1 and have only lost to a I-A, dog. The Top 25 isn't only supposed to be I-AA playoff teams. Grambling's good. They're in.

Only one Southland team - Northwestern St. - and at #20? Yep. The Southland, granted, are playing lots of I-A's, but too many of them are 1-2 and have problems. The only one that has proven anything to this point is the Demons, who at least toppled I-A Louisiana-Monroe. Texas State has played nobody, I don't beleieve in Sam Houston St., and McNeese St. needs to show me a good win as well.

Tomorrow is my Lehigh/VMI preview. Be there!

Comments

Post a Comment

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....
42 comments
Read more

Examining A Figure Skating Rivalry: Tonya and Nancy

It must be very hard for a millennial to understand the fuss around the Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding figure skating scandal in the run-up to the 1994 Olympics. If you're of a certain age, though - whether you're a figure skating fan or not, and I am decidedly no fan of figure skating - the Shakespearean story of Harding and Kerrigan still engages, and still grabs peoples' attention, twenty years later. Why, though?  Why, twenty years later, in a sport I care little, does the story still grab me?  Why did I spend time out of my life watching dueling NBC and ESPN documentaries on the subject, and Google multiple stories about Jeff Gilooly , idiot "bodyguards", and the whole sordid affair? I think it's because the story, even twenty years later, is like opium. The addictive story, even now, has everything.  Everything.  The woman that fought for everything, perhaps crossing over to the dark side to get her chance at Olypic Gold, vs. the woman who...
1 comment
Read more

#TheRivalry Flashback: November 21st, 1987: Lehigh 17, Lafayette 10

Since becoming an undergrad at Lehigh back in the late 1980s, I first heard about the historic nature of the football team and "The Rivalry" through the stories that fellow students would share. I did not attend the final meeting between Lehigh and Lafayette at Taylor Stadium, which was the final time a football game would be played there. Those that did attend said that was that it was cold. "I remember it being one of the coldest games ever," Mark Redmann recollected, "with strong Northwesterly winds and the temperature hovering around 20.  By the end of the game, the stands were half empty because most of the fans just couldn't take the cold. "Fortunately, several of my fraternity brothers snuck in flasks to help fend off the chill."
7 comments
Read more