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....

UMass 21, Lafayette 14, halftime

Are you watching this game? UMass had this game under control until about 3 minutes in the second quarter, and then got an interception, converted for a TD. Then the Leopards forced a fumble off the return, and then converted THAT for a TD, making this a game. It's on CN8. You really should be watching this.

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...