Skip to main content

My FCS Top 25, 9/5/2016

You didn't ask for them - nobody is - but here's my pick for this week's FCS Top 25.


1. North Dakota State
2. Richmond
3. Eastern Washington
4. Northern Iowa
5. Sam Houston State
6. William and Mary
7. South Dakota State
8. Chattanooga
9. James Madison
10. Penn
11. Jacksonville State
12. Charleston Southern
13. Montana
14. Illinois State
15. Portland State
16. Harvard
17. The Citadel
18. Colgate
19. New Hampshire
20. Northern Arizona
21. Villanova
22. Western Illinois
23. Central Arkansas
24. Fordham
25. Albany

Notes on my Top 25:

* The biggest FCS over FBS upsets made my list, of course.  Albany, who wasn't even in the same solar system as  my original Top 25, made it after their shocking upset of Buffalo.  Richmond, UNI, and Eastern Washington, already in my Top 25, leap up to near the top of the class after a trio of admittedly impressive upsets of FBS schools.

* No FCS upset was as complete or dominating as Richmond's pulverization of Virginia, 37-20, a game that wasn't nearly as close as the final score indicated.  Sure, Virginia head coach Bronco Mendenhall was in his first game as head coach, and he's trying to retool a paleo run-only offense to a modern, fast-paced one.  But Richmond, who should have already been in most people's Top Ten (or even Top Five), just kicked the Cavaliers out of the gates and just kept pounding.  You can't help but take notice.

* One team that impressed me, even in defeat, was South Dakota State giving TCU everything they could handle offensively in their 59-41 loss.  Deep into the 4th quarter, South Dakota State was matching the Horned Frogs nearly score-for-score, and even though 59 points seems like a lot of points to give up in any college football game, it seems logical that TCU will be putting up similar performances in Big 12 play, too.  The Jackrabbits seem like they're going places.
Labels:

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. W
40 comments
Read more

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.
20 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