Top 25 rankings

[downtown48]

Coming from a Linfield fan who's team has gotten the benefit of the doubt in the polls the last few months, I thought the ONU ranking was a bit of a stretch only dropping 2 spots after getting destroyed 44-0.  I agree you should get a pass much like UWL got a couple of weeks ago, but they didn't lose by 44. 

After reading Smed's explanation, it makes a bit more sense to me and I can see the deal now...the one I can't understand however is St. Olaf moving up five spots!  To me that is rediculous...A loss is a loss.  If you want to say they get a pass because SJU is really tough fine...but up five spots...that's debatable???

I guess that's why a it's called a poll. 

[Pat Coleman]

Indeed, and why they are rankings and not standings.

If someone goes to the No. 4 team and plays them within one point on the road, where should they be ranked? No. 22? Seems unlikely.

[K-Mack]

Is it my imagination or is the poll coming out later and later these past two weeks?

IIAC voter among the last to file.

The deadline is 3 p.m. and it's incumbent on the 25 voters to meet or come close (yours truly) to meeting that time so it can be out by early evening. It's one of those things where you can't scrap it and throw up a poll with 23 voters, you need to track the missing guys down. And that's not as easy as it sounds if they are coaches reviewing film (video, right Pat?) with their teams or spending time with their families or travelling.

I guess that's my understanding, I shouldn't imply I have extra insight into the process. I've always wondered about having backup voters in case of this, but what would happen is, given the variance among any two ballots, teams could show what I'll term 'false movement' in the polls if the same 25 people aren't voting each week.

For instance, if I have Wesley ranked 20th and the backup voter has them ranked 10th, and I miss a week, but then I vote in time the next week, with Wesley back at 20, they have gone up and down without it being a reaction to what they're doing on the field.

So we're kind of stuck with how it works.

[pg04]

Although I generally think the poll is correct, I do think ONU losing at home by 44 should merit a more than 2 position drop. 

On the other hand, I do agree with the St. Olaf movement to a certain degree. 

[Ralph Turner]

Coming from a Linfield fan who's team has gotten the benefit of the doubt in the polls the last few months, I thought the ONU ranking was a bit of a stretch only dropping 2 spots after getting destroyed 44-0.  I agree you should get a pass much like UWL got a couple of weeks ago, but they didn't lose by 44. 

After reading Smed's explanation, it makes a bit more sense to me and I can see the deal now...the one I can't understand however is St. Olaf moving up five spots!  To me that is rdiculous...A loss is a loss.  If you want to say they get a pass because SJU is really tough fine...but up five spots...that's debatable???

I guess that's why a it's called a poll. 

St Olaf lost by one on the road at Collegeville...

Please name me the five toughest venues in D3 in this mid decade...

Any objections to...
1) MUC
2) UWW
3) Catdome
4) UMHB
5) Collegeville? ? ?

Where else is tougher?

St Olaf even took votes out of SJU.

I see the poll as breaking out this way...

1) MUC
2) UMHB
3) UWW
4-7) SJU/Wheaton/Central/Capital
8 ) SJF
9-10) W&J/Wesley
11-12)  ONU/Salisbury
13) St Olaf
14-16)  Wabash/Alfred/UWEC
17-20)  Wartburg/UWL/Montclair/Linfield
21-22)  Oxy/UWSP
23-25)  Trinity/TCNJ/Whitworth.

Also 26-30 are crammed in there, too.  Whitworth gets 66 votes, but the next 5 teams go RPI 57, Muhlenberg 48, Franklin 45, HSU 40, and MSJ 39.  Franklin and MSJ settle their score this weekend. 

We are up to 49 teams receiving votes.  The mid-season upsets are causing some rethinking of the "second tier" schools.  The Receiving Votes group got 474 votes compared to 356 after Week 4 Poll -- 2007.  In week #6 of 2006, only 41 teams received votes, and the vote total for 26-41 was only 226 votes.

[K-Mack]

It's out now.

I really can't fathom how ONU loses 44-0 and drops only two spots from 9 to 11.  Unbelievable.

Why?

1. They lost to Mt. Union.
2. Wartburg, La Crosse and Trinity all lost.

If those three teams all won, they'd be 14 or so.

That's the kind of thing that causes people to question the credibility of the poll, smed.

No it doesn't! Everyone who knows about this poll knows about Mt. Union, so basically, I think ONU gets a pass on that game. It's perfectly reasonable to me!

Well,
I tend to agree with Smed here. Mount Union has made a habit of making other very good, even top 10, Division III teams look very bad. The voters have grown accustomed to this and treat bad losses to MUC with a grain of salt. A couple years ago John Caroll lost to MUC 70-0 and finished 7-3, including a 25-point win against 8-2 Ohio Northern. Then there are the playoff games against Augustana and John Carroll, etc.

I also agree about the other top 25 teams that fell making it tough to drop ONU much further. As I said to you the other day, Josh, you get to a point in the poll where maybe you don't think a team is worth a vote that high, but someone has to go there. You can't rank 1-9 and then five 14s.

I have much bigger beefs about the poll this week, which I will write about with more clarity in ATN, I assume. But a sampling:

Wartburg and Trinity fell completely off my ballot. Given the top 25 events of the past two weeks, the bump-up style of voting wasn't cutting it for me. I had to re-evaluate from scratch, which meant comparing one-loss teams of similar ilk. If Millsaps and Trinity were compared, for example, Trinity lost at Rhodes by two TDs, Millsaps beat them 42-0. Millsaps also has a 1-point loss to a 4-1 team also receiving votes, Trinity lost to a 3-2 teams which has wins against LaGrange and Birm.-Southern.

I'm not calling our voters lazy as some people do, just saying that's the kind of time I put in and the way I have to look at things some weeks. Some weeks the results are predictable enough you can slide people up and down without too much effort, sometimes you have to tear down and rebuild the whole thing.

Poll voting / inexact science = same

[Ralph Turner]

Yes, Keith!  I agree that this next week's poll may be the time when the other voters tear down the poll and start over.

I believe that we are seeing this in that 49 teams are getting votes, as I discussed above.

We should also see some more shuffling as conference play deepens.

It is almost like this season is seeing a "changing of the guard" in many conferences.

[downtown48]

If someone goes to the No. 4 team and plays them within one point on the road, where should they be ranked? No. 22? Seems unlikely.

I agree...they shouldn't drop from 18 to 22 but I just don't think they should jump 5 spots...the best part about this though is we'll have playoffs at the end of the year!!

Ralph, I've got no problem with the venues although Linfield has lost home playoff games...of course those were to SJU and UWW but home nonetheless...other than that it's been pretty tough!

[Pat Coleman]

I also agree about the other top 25 teams that fell making it tough to drop ONU much further. As I said to you the other day, Josh, you get to a point in the poll where maybe you don't think a team is worth a vote that high, but someone has to go there. You can rank 1-9 and then five 14s.

For me that spot was 11. I wasn't happy with any possible No. 11 team.

[K-Mack]

Regarding St. Olaf, there are two things at work here:

1) When you have two teams go down to the wire like that, much like UW-W and UW-L did last week, you have an either-team-could-have-won situation. So if a game basically came down to who had the ball last or was what you might call a toss-up, how can you have 20 spots between them in the rankings? If you believe they are basically even? Now, that has a greater effect IMHO earlier in the season, when there is less other data to gauge the teams by. I actually moved UW-L up to one spot behind where I had Whitewater after last week. But that wouldn't have been so easy if there weren't ...

2) A lack of other convincing performances by teams you think "deserve to move up." In weeks like the past two, when a handful of top 10s and 25s have lost or struggled, or just played not-strong competition (how far can you really move W&J after a 64-6 win against St. Vincent? Or Trinity vs. BSU?), it becomes a situation where you might downgrade your opinion of a particular team, but no one or not many arise to take their place, so their spot remains virtually unchanged. Given the losses mentioned already on this thread this week, it should help to explain why ONU didn't fall further. ONU is not playing in a vacuum. They are being judged against their peers, and if their peers also don't perform, then we might have several teams we're not as convinced about as we were last week, but the numbers 9 and 11 don't necessarily reflect that.

Also, I don't have time to get into it now, but I don't think a loss is a loss in the minds of voters. A team can most certainly prove a lot even if it doesn't win, esp. when two top 25s are engaging in battle and someone has to lose. Doesn't mean one must come off looking bad, necessarily ...

[K-Mack]

I'm not suggesting the Polar Bears shouldn't be ranked--even in the top 20.  But only dropping them two spots after getting blown out is giving way too much of a Mt. Union cushion.  They should be somewhere between 15-20 after a--wait on it--44 point blowout loss.

Nobody should get a pass for losing by 44, smed.  Keeping it close or even respectable is a different story--but not the case, here.  You've been around these boards long enough that you should know that by now. 

What about a 47-14 loss? How much cushion do you allow for that?

Sorry. That was mean. Couldn't resist.

[Toby Taff]

I'm not suggesting the Polar Bears shouldn't be ranked--even in the top 20.  But only dropping them two spots after getting blown out is giving way too much of a Mt. Union cushion.  They should be somewhere between 15-20 after a--wait on it--44 point blowout loss.

Nobody should get a pass for losing by 44, smed.  Keeping it close or even respectable is a different story--but not the case, here.  You've been around these boards long enough that you should know that by now. 

What about a 47-14 loss? How much cushion do you allow for that?

Sorry. That was mean. Couldn't resist.

Wow!  I'll say this about HSU and the HSU faithful (there are a few, they were in the stands). Most of the people I talked with on campus this week were pretty sure of the outcome. One of the biggest HSU homers I know said if MHB & HSU both show up with their best games its MHB by 3 td's.

[K-Mack]

I'll agree with you there. I gave HSU more chance than anyone I talked to did. It looked OK at the half, the prospects for a decent game did, and UMHB just floored it. HSU's offense not being able to stay on the field doesn't help any when it's not a dominant D to begin with, and then they have to watch UMHB do hockey-like line changes on the OL. Killer.

Another neat thing is that people at McMurry knew about the HSU game and cared (some) ... Very rare you talk to anyone in town besides alumni (or people connected in some other way) of a D3 school, and they know now only who is playing that day, but how significant.

Then again, that might just be Texas. Where the ladies, the geeks, the children, they can all talk football right along with your stereotypical guy fan.

[repete]

Coming from a Linfield fan who's team has gotten the benefit of the doubt in the polls the last few months, I thought the ONU ranking was a bit of a stretch only dropping 2 spots after getting destroyed 44-0.  I agree you should get a pass much like UWL got a couple of weeks ago, but they didn't lose by 44. 

After reading Smed's explanation, it makes a bit more sense to me and I can see the deal now...the one I can't understand however is St. Olaf moving up five spots!  To me that is rdiculous...A loss is a loss.  If you want to say they get a pass because SJU is really tough fine...but up five spots...that's debatable???

I guess that's why a it's called a poll. 

St Olaf lost by one on the road at Collegeville...

Please name me the five toughest venues in D3 in this mid decade...

Any objections to...
1) MUC
2) UWW
3) Catdome
4) UMHB
5) Collegeville? ? ?

Where else is tougher?

Well, small sample size, RT, but comparing Catdome to Clemens using the occupants .... only one team has won at both places.

In its last 120 games dating back to 1987, SJU has a record of 107-12-1 in Collegeville about 90 percent.

Or starting in 2000 to present 46-5 for SJU by a very quick count.  UMHB is 36-5. Linfield 38-6. UWW with some middle of the pack season in tough WIAC is 35-7. Won't even worry about MUC ...

Of course, all schedules are not alike -- a key factor. While schedule probably hurts SJU worse than others here, the Johnnies' can counter with a 9-0 home playoff mark during the period.

Can't vouch for the math . . .  it's 2:30 a.m.and I'm sitting here on painkillers for a broken foot.

[Ralph Turner]

Thanks repete, for helping me to make the case for how impressive the St Olaf's performance was last weekend.