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

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....

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...

#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."

Lehigh Football Nation

Search This Blog