FB: College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin

[USee]

Interesting developments in the top 25.

Wheaton remains 7th
NCC falls to 13th

And in a baffling move for the ORVs Franklin received more votes (12) than IWU (3). Which means a couple voters had Franklin on their ballot but now IWU. That's a credibility problem.

[Titan Q]

And in a baffling move for the ORVs Franklin received more votes (12) than IWU (3). Which means a couple voters had Franklin on their ballot but now IWU. That's a credibility problem.

I have no idea where IWU belongs in the Top 25 landscape (in the top 25, receiving votes, no votes), but yes, this is bad.

[USee]

I agree we don't know where IWU should be. But we know with certainty where Franklin should be relative to IWU.  It's not like a top 10 team lost on the road to an unranked team in a close game. 

[AndOne]

Presto, magic. Among the surprises:

John Carroll wins and drops two spots. Yet Thomas More wins and gains seven spots.
NCC falls two places not by losing, but by not even playing. Chapman also doesn't play, but gains two spots.
IWU doesn't get wherever they should be by somehow receiving fewer votes than the team they beat. 

[Pat Coleman]

Presto, magic. Among the surprises:

John Carroll wins and drops two spots. Yet Thomas More wins and gains seven spots.
NCC falls two places not by losing, but by not even playing. Chapman also doesn't play, but gains two spots.
IWU doesn't get wherever they should be by somehow receiving fewer votes than the team they beat. 

Yeah I don't know what to make of Franklin except that one or two voters clearly didn't get the memo. (And I do send a memo.) It only takes a couple when you're at the bottom end of the poll.

But AndOne, look at what your other teams did and AS ALWAYS, what the teams around them did!

John Carroll struggled with a team that was sub-.500 last year. Struggled with a team that it beat 44-0 last year despite playing its backup quarterback. Meanwhile, Wabash beat a 2014 playoff team handily on the road. Perhaps that's a good switch, right?

North Central did absolutely zero last week and got passed by two teams that won handily. Quit your whining -- I am sure North Central will play 10 games this year and it will even out, IF North Central deserves it.

Chapman gains two spots only because three teams lost and fell below Chapman, not because of anything Chapman did.

AndOne, you have been following Division III far too long to mail in "analysis" like that.  Honestly, you ought to just delete your post, it's so uninformed.

[kiko]

North Central actually gained points, from 324 to 328, without taking the field.  Their slight drop in the ordinal ranking is more a facet of what happened to teams around them, and not because of some real or imagined slight of the team.  And whether they rank 10th or wherever is pretty irrelevant IMO at this  stage of the season -- there are bigger things to be concerned with.

The Wheaties also gained points, from 430 to 456, but as we know, absent losses or signature wins, movement at the top of the poll can be glacial.

Franklin fell from 42 to 12 while Illinois Wesleyan went from zero to 6.  I can't and won't defend these two vote totals, but I read that as someone -- or a smattering of someones -- who were highish on Franklin still considering them a Top 25 team despite the loss.  As Pat suggests, this will sort itself out as the weeks progress.

[79jaybird]

Overall, not a bad week for the CCIW.  Elmhurst looked ok, just ok for the 1st week.  There were signs of improvement and noticeable gaps on both o and d at times.  However, I feel that EC will have to play much, much better if they want to beat the top 3 teams in conference play this year. 

[mr_b]

Congratulations to North Park linebacker Chaun Maiava, who was named to the D3 Football Team of the Week for his 12-tackle effort against Concordia Wisconsin this past Saturday.

[Gregory Sager]

2nd most surprising is UWSP, picked to finish 4th in the WIAC, losing @Albion, 65-52. I don't know if I was more surprised by the result, where UWSP gave up 21 pts in the last 3minutes of the game, or the score, which is a  lot of points.

That would've been a lot of points given up by the Pointers basketball team, which averaged only 54.6 points allowed last season, including 50.1 in the playoffs. There were only five occasions in 32 games last season in which the UWSP cagers gave up more points than the UWSP gridders surrendered to the Britons last Saturday.

[ExTartanPlayer]

John Carroll wins and drops two spots. Yet Thomas More wins and gains seven spots.

Uh, what?

John Carroll (who was ranked higher to start with) posted a "blah" result against a mediocre opponent.  One certainly could make an argument that they could be docked a few spots for the relatively-poor result.

Thomas More blew the doors off a ranked opponent.  Considering that this was probably the single most impressive Week-1 result of anyone, one could also make an argument that TMC deserved to move up several spots.

[AndOne]

Ex,

I have no problem with Thomas More's upward mobility. I just mentioned the number of spots they gained for comparison purposes.

John Carroll piled up almost twice as much total yardage (389 to 204) as their opponent, and beat them by 3+ touchdowns (23 points). It just seems that this is enough of a dominant performance not to lose 2 places in the poll. How much more do you want them to do to just maintain their original position?

Keep in mind also, that the JC coaching staff employed almost 70% of their roster in the game rather than playing, say 40-50% and running up the score once the game was safely in hand. It seems that JC's only "sin," as far as poll position is concerned was not continuing to kick an undermanned opponent once they were down. I wouldn't have expected the Blue Streaks to move upward at all, but by winning and still dropping in the poll, it makes it seem like the primary criteria in the poll is solely point differential and monkey stomping/humiliating your opponent.

Likewise, I feel if you are good enough to be ranked in whatever position, and you don't play, you haven't done anything to jepordize the ranking. Granted, you don't have a win, but you haven't lost a game and thus, shouldn't lose your position. Otherwise you're being penalized for scheduling rather than for inferior performance.

This is JMHO which wasn't posted with the intent is starting a battle. I don't think this is whining, as labeled by another above poster who, for some reason, felt compelled to label it as such rather than just stating his opinion which I understand could certainly differ from mine. Peace. 

[BashDad]

I wouldn't have expected the Blue Streaks to move upward at all, but by winning and still dropping in the poll, it makes it seem like the primary criteria in the poll is solely point differential and monkey stomping/humiliating your opponent.

Rankings are indicative of expectations. John Carrol disappointed expectations while a.) SJU met them and b.) Wabash exceeded them. So those three teams were then reorganized.

[Gregory Sager]

Likewise, I feel if you are good enough to be ranked in whatever position, and you don't play, you haven't done anything to jepordize the ranking. Granted, you don't have a win, but you haven't lost a game and thus, shouldn't lose your position. Otherwise you're being penalized for scheduling rather than for inferior performance.

Your fellow Cardinals fan has already addressed this complaint, Mark:

North Central actually gained points, from 324 to 328, without taking the field.  Their slight drop in the ordinal ranking is more a facet of what happened to teams around them, and not because of some real or imagined slight of the team.

[ExTartanPlayer]

It just seems that this is enough of a dominant performance not to lose 2 places in the poll. How much more do you want them to do to just maintain their original position?

See, I really disagree this line of thinking (not specific to you, AndOne, but in general).  It's incredibly naive.

The rankings should be compiled by continually comparing the teams' bodies of work against one another.  Not by saying "Eh, they did pretty well this week, I'll just keep them where they are" or "They did badly, I'm moving them down a spot" - it's more dynamic than that!  If they played OK, and other teams around them played better, why are we obligated to keep them in place just because they won?  This is the worst kind of trickle-down-from-D1-polls thinking, the idea that the team ranked X stays ranked X until someone ahead of them loses (so they can move up) or until they lose (in which case they will move down).  There's so much more to a result than whether the team "won" or "lost" the game.  Rankings aren't standings - the quality of the result matters.

Did JCU handle St. Vincent with ease?  Sure, and having played for a powerful HS program that often took our foot off the gas at halftime and "only" won some games 35-7ish when we could have named our score, I appreciate the comment that they did the right thing by playing much of the roster.  Except that, uh...well, let's take a look into your postulation that they took their foot off the gas: a look at the 4th quarter play-by-play shows that the starting QB threw a touchdown pass on the first play of the 4th quarter, then threw 4 more passes (on 4 plays) on the next possession, then on the next possession (the game's second-to-last for JCU) he was intercepted throwing into the endzone with 5:40 to go.  Did they play a lot of the roster?  Yeah, I guess the participation report indicates so.  But, really, I'm not buying the argument that the JCU margin of victory was somehow deflated because they took their foot off the gas, not when the starting QB was still in the game and chucking for most of the 4th quarter.

(NOTE: I am not, in any way, suggesting that this is unsportsmanlike play.  I have no qualms with it at all; 26-3 is hardly a decided game and I have NO issue with throwing the ball in that position.  Just trying to debunk this notion that JCU's 23-point margin of victory was deflated because they backed off the gas)

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A related tangent: when a team moves up or down in the polls, there's always this misunderstanding that "the voters" moved one team ahead of the other, as though it's some collective decision of the hivemind.  That's not how a poll works!  Some voters probably kept them in place.  Some may have leapfrogged another team or two ahead of Team X.  But a team jumping Team X in the poll does not necessarily indicate that the voter hivemind moved Team X ahead of Team Y.  It means that Team Y picked up enough total points to move ahead of Team X.  Consider the following hypothetical:

Team X enters the week ranked 10th with 400 voter points.  Voter #1 has them ranked 11th on his ballot.
Team Y enters the week ranked 11th with 395 voter points.  Voter #1 has them ranked 19th on his ballot.

Team X wins 28-3 against a so-so opponent.  Voter #1 keeps them where they are in 11th.
Team Y wins 48-0 against a good opponent.  Voter #1 moves them from 19th up to 12th based on this dominant performance.

If everyone else kept their ballots exactly the same as they were the week before, Team Y would now jump Team X in the rankings, even though not one single voter actually moved Team Y ahead of Team X this week (that didn't already have them there).  It just happened that this week, Team Y gained enough points to move ahead of Team X, not that "the voters" huddled and moved one team ahead of the other.

Now let's look at this specific to John Carroll's situation this week.  Even ignoring that nuance, let's take the blind, simple view that teams just move up and down relative to the teams around them based on the week's result, and take a look at these three teams this week:

St. John's beat Dubuque 45-9, in a game where they actually can play the "foot off the gas" excuse (led 31-0 in second quarter, played three different quarterbacks, starting QB left the game mid-3rd-quarter).  Dubuque was a 4-6 team last year in a decent conference, and has some relatively-recent history of success.

Wabash arguably notched the most impressive Week 1 result this side of Thomas More, demolishing a perennial playoff team 35-3 and posting a few "Holy ****" defensive stats like the fewest points HSC has ever scored under Favret, fewest yards gained, etc.  Or something like that.

John Carroll, as has been covered, won 26-3 against St. Vincent, with their starting QB throwing about 10 passes in the fourth quarter and getting INT'd in the endzone on the second-to-last drive of the game.  SVC was 4-6 last year and is at best a middling PAC team, with one winning season ever (2011) in the program's eight-year history, and is a team that JCU blasted 44-0 with their backup QB playing last year.

So, um, I'm curious why anyone would choose to keep John Carroll ahead of either St. John's or Wabash if they're actually ranking the teams based on Week 1 results?  Besides the aforementioned lazy "they won, so they should stay where they are in the poll" line of thinking.  It's pretty indisputable that JCU notched the least impressive result of the three.  Not just by final score, but by actual breakdown of what happened in the game.

Don't think of polls with "they won this week, so they should stay in spot X" or "Team X was penalized for winning by X points" logic.  Seriously.  It's dumb.  Leave that for SEC fans that can't read.  Use a little nuance.  JCU had a far less impressive game than the two teams that leapfrogged them in the poll.  It was totally justified.

[firstdown]

Just a reminder that polls are fun and for discussion purposes, but they are really beauty contests.  Polls provide some means to compare teams, but when teams don't have some opponents in common, it is ultimately a guess, an educated guess to be sure.  It does make the season more fun particularly when it comes down to the final weeks.  While polls are subjective by their nature,  the D3Football Poll and the AFCA Poll receive input from very knowledgeable observers.  The fan polls on these boards also get input from a group with a lot of experience in observing football games and teams. 

I find it interesting how the polls tend to converge as we get late in the season and the landscape becomes clearer and you don't quite the type of movement that you see in the early polls.

The only polls that ultimately matter are the regional rankings that the selection committee uses to select the tournament participants.