Skip to main content

My FCS Top 25, 9/6/2011

Below the flip, see my Top 25 for this week.  (more)
 1: Eastern Washington Eagles
2: Georgia Southern Eagles
3: William & Mary Tribe
4: Richmond Spiders
5: North Dakota State Bison
6: Delaware Fightin' Blue Hens
7: Wofford Terriers
8: Northern Iowa Panthers
9: Appalachian State Mountaineers
10: Lehigh Mountain Hawks
11: Sacramento State Hornets
12: Montana State Bobcats
13: Jacksonville State Gamecocks
14: Stephen F. Austin Lumberjacks
15: New Hampshire Wildcats
16: Southern Illinois Salukis
17: James Madison Dukes
18: Pennsylvania Quakers
19: Bethune-Cookman Wildcats
20: South Carolina State Bulldogs
21: Montana Grizzlies
22: Liberty Flames
23: Chattanooga Mocs
24: McNeese State Cowboys
25: Colgate Raiders

Three quick hits on my Top 25:
1) Villanova, with a giant loss to Temple this year, could have been a huge reality check that the Wildcats will struggle.  That's why they're not in my Top 25.

2) Not a lot of love for the OVC in my poll.  Jacksonville State struggled to beat an (admittedly) good team in UT-Martin, but struggled to get a late lead at home and was helped by the officials denying a late-game FG attempt for the Skyhawks.  The Gamecocks might recover and make this a successful season yet, but the nail-biter to start the year might be the sign that the OVC might not be all that.

3) Appalachian State and Delaware, both victims of lopsided losses to (admittedly) pretty good FBS competition in Virginia Tech and Navy, still barely remained in my Top Ten - mainly because, frankly, it was hard to see who was going to remain in the Top Ten after a tough week.  It made Northern Iowa, a team who would normally have dropped after a tough week, into, surprisingly, a team on the rise by "only" losing by one to Iowa State.

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....

Merrimack at Lehigh Game Breakdown and Fearless Prediction, 9/28/2019

It's what we do every week: copiously go over the opposing game notes and analyze the upcoming game matchup.  I'm starting to call these the "football nerd" previews because it feels like the audience for these detailed team breakdowns are other football nerds like myself.  For Lehigh fans, there is no greater need for a "football nerd"-level breakdown of an opponent than Merrimack.  Few opponents have been as big as an unknown to Mountain Hawk fans as the school that formed right after World War II in North Andover, Massachusetts.  Helping that sense of mystery is that the Merrimack Athletics' website offers no football game notes, and when you click on the link called "Weekly Two-Deep", you get a two-deep from 2018. Merrimack, until recently a member of the Northeast-10 conference in Division II, announced they are going to join the NEC as a full Division I member in time for the 2023-2024 season. “The College’s 2011 strategic ...

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.