We skipped last week but we've got everything in from the last two weeks into these rankings.
The big question is, what to do about UCLA? They have not won a lot of the games they kind of needed to win in order to be ranked in the Top 8 in the West, but they did beat Cal Poly over the weekend, and is that enough?
Overall, Cal Poly's record is better than UCLA's, especially when you look at common opponents. However, the Bruins did beat the Mustangs, so there's that.
We think, in the end, this comes down to strength of schedule. So we took a look at it. We looked at everyone in our Top 25 and put a ranking on their opponents. We used the latest ranking for D1A opponents, and a general ranking value for non-D1A opponents.
The results were very interesting. The toughest schedule on a per-game basis was Navy, with Mount St. Mary's close behind.
There were really tiers. Navy, MSM, and Penn State in the toughest tier. Cal, Arizona, UMW, and Army were in the next tier (by our measurement, Arizona and Mary Washington has equally tough schedules, even though they rarely played the same teams).
The next tier was Life, St. Thomas, UCLA, Cal Poly, Grand Canyon, Arkansas State, Saint Mary's, BYU, and Davenport.
Sometimes a team will play a lot of fairly well-ranked teams. Sometimes they play teams not ranked, or not ranked highly, plus some very challenging teams (Saint Mary's is one of those).
So all of this comes down to seeing that Cal Poly and UCLA have about the same strength of schedule. We've decided to rank them close to each other, but Cal Poly higher based on overall record.
San Diego, however, drops a bit because they have one of the least challenging schedules.
A quick note in here about Lindenwood. They are in the lower tier, too, but they play by far the most games (15 so far) and they often double-up on weekend. We counted everyone, but really Lindenwood plays a very challenging schedule, including Arizona, Life, and Arkansas State ... they just play lots of other teams too.
A nod to Ohio State, by the way, who are just behind Lindenwood with 14 games. Saint Mary's is at 13.
