My FCS Top 25, 9/2/2012

My vote for the FCS Top 25 for the week ending 9/2/2012 follows below the flip.

1: North Dakota State Bison
2: Georgia Southern Eagles
3: Montana State Bobcats
4: Sam Houston State Bearkats
5: Northern Iowa Panthers
6: Appalachian State Mountaineers
7: New Hampshire Wildcats
8: Stony Brook Seawolves
9: Lehigh Mountain Hawks
10: Towson Tigers
11: Eastern Washington Eagles
12: Maine Black Bears
13: Wofford Terriers
14: James Madison Dukes
15: Montana Grizzlies
16: Delaware Fightin' Blue Hens
17: Youngstown State Penguins
18: Tennessee Tech Golden Eagles
19: Indiana State Sycamores
20: McNeese State Cowboys
21: Illinois State Redbirds
22: Harvard Crimson
23: Albany Great Danes
24: Central Arkansas Bears
25: Norfolk State Spartans

Most significant win: It has to be Youngstown State's dominating win over Pitt of the FBS, 31-17, just narrowly edging out McNeese State's 27-21 win over FBS Middle Tennessee State and Eastern Washington's 20-3 win over FBS Idaho. This is mostly because Youngstown wasn't even on my ballot last week, but enter here at No. 17 this week.
Some folks I've seen have Youngstown and McNeese much higher on their ballots, but, honestly, does anyone actually think these "upsets" of FBS teams were anything spectacular (and while we're at it, we can add UT Martin's 20-17 win over FBS Memphis)? Memphis and Middle Tennessee State, inarguably two of the worst programs in FBS this year, were serious upset watches anyway. Idaho is an FCS program-to-be in all but name - and they certainly would be a middle-of-the-pack team in the Big Sky. Michigan, USC and Notre Dame, they ain't.
As for Pitt, new head coach Paul Chryst suspended six players before the game, and did their level best to make Youngstown State look like Ohio State in their game on Saturday. While you don't want to take away from the Penguins' achievement, the truth is Pitt is an awful football program right now, and the Big East is looking pretty small.
Most Significant Loss: Towson looked like they could possibly upset Kent State last Thirsday, coming into the game brimming with confidence after their CAA championship last year. Instead, six turnovers against the Golden Flashes were way too much to overcome as the former Patriot League member fell 41-21 to Kent State.
Forgotten Team: Tennessee Tech. Last year's OVC winners bring a whole lot of talent back to Cookeville, including QB Tre Lamb. Folks have already written them off in the OVC title race, but they are wrong. While they won't win awards this week with their 41-31 win over Hampton to start the year, I feel confident they will more than justify their ranking.

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...

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