This was a relatively difficult rankings to do in part because there is a bloc of teams in the 25-45 area that probably needs to be shuffled around.

Many of these teams in the 25-45 range don't play much outside their region. So we rely on what some teams do accomplish across borders to inform some of the decisions.

It could be that the teams in Washington and Wisconsin are stronger than teams in Tennessee. Right now the Tennessee teams are high in part because of Germantown. It was Germantown that beat SLUH, beat Brother Martin, tied Jesuit New Orleans, beat LIttle Rock, Charlotte Tigers and lost a close one vs LaSalle, which is ranked #17 among school teams. So teams such as Raptors has some context to follow Germantown. 

But a further note about Germantown—look at that list of teams they played. They took a trip to Louisiana. They played a small tournament of teams from various areas. They played at Nash Bash. They looked at their regular season and decided to get more games, and they, as much as anyone, have proven they are stronger than teams in other regions.

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Now we have a couple of instances of putting aside results. This is always a tough decision but sometimes has to be done.

Tempe

Tempe's ranking is based on a very close loss to Granite Bay, and a very close loss to SOC, and two big wins over Red Mountain. The SOC loss is weird because we kind of use it to bump Tempe up, and we kind of put it aside because we has Tempe ahead of SOC—because losses. In the end, looking at the totality of the season, we feel that Tempe's ranking is somewhat justified, but the justification is a bit thin. They aren't exactly Germantown when it comes to finding outside competition. So Tempe drops to #8 and SOC moves up to #7. The Raptors had a very close loss to Belmont Shore, and really we think that any of those top eight teams could be the best on any weekend.

Fort Hunt and Vienna

This one was tough to throw out because we were at the game in question. But Fort Hunt's strength of schedule and their results have to be taken into account. We talked about strength of schedule last week, with Aspetuck playing 10 currently-ranked opponents with an average ranking of 12.5. Fort Hunt has played 11 currently-ranked opponents (and actually Aspetuck does too now as they played Morris this past week). The average ranking is 14.4 (Aspetuck's is now 15.8), with Fort Hunt going 8-3 in those games. And this is the key aspect to us. Fort Hunt lost to Vienna, which would normally put them behind Vienna ... and honestly on that day Vienna looked much the stronger team.

But making things ore difficult is Fort Hunt beating Aspetuck, a team that Vienna lost to when Aspetuck was much more in their season (Fort Hunt's win came after Aspetuck had just starting practicing and were undercooked). Should Fort Hunt sit behind Vienna? A week later in a shortened game Fort Hunt beat Vienna 14-12. Hmm ...

Vienna's schedule is pretty impressive too—10 ranked opponents, average ranking 16.9 (5-4-1).

The thing is, in retrospect, as we were looking at this, we feel now that we have Clayton ranked far too low, and Vienna beat Clayton 54-0 (!). 

So maybe we've overthought this. Maybe we remember that Fort Hunt beat Royal Irish and Berks and even if Vienna remains ahead of Fort Hunt, we can do that. We do not think Fort Hunt would beat Aspetuck today. That early result we have to put aside. We would have losed to have seen the Charlotte Cardinals play one of these teams mid-season. A little bad luck made that not happen.

Berks could be mixed in here and they instead move down after winning (sorry guys). This is mostly because their ranking is based heavily on beating Gregory the Great. But Berks did play Fort Hunt and Aspetuck, which is soemthing we haven't seen much from the Pennsylvania teams. So Berks has to hold up their ranking on their own, and they do a pretty good job, but they nudge down a place because we decided