As we keep saying, these are early days.
Early days mean that one result can make a massive difference, but it also means that some teams that are ranked highly now will drop down even if they don't play any more games. More results, especially against other successful opposition, will force those changes.
So we come to St. Francis, a new school team that already upended one of our most highly-ranked teams in De La Salle. Do we just vault St. Francis into the stratosphere? Or do we drop DLS down several spots? Or do we find a solution somewhere in the middle?
Our concern is that a two-point victory early in the season requires backup. St. Francis has four games on their schedule, and we know that despite the strength of their schedule (Serra HS and Jesuit Sacramento remain to be played) four games isn't very much. (High School rugby seasons have become quite complicated with the advent of school-then-club seasons, but the hope is these players join a club. NorCal's concurrent school-club seasons make this even more complex.)
Meanwhile, Jesuit, another team we think could be quite strong, took an early-season trip to Southern California, which is something we endorse. They lost two games, including a game to a San Juan Hills team that has some of the building blocks to the SOC Raptors club. But San Juan is 2-2 in their league and not considered one of the very top school teams in SoCal's school-then-club system. Jesuit also lost, quite competitively, to Belmont Shore, which is the defending national runner-up.
So again we're faced with the question of dropping a team way down for one result, or waiting a bit.
In the end, we have given St. Francis the benefit of the doubt, partly because we know as more teams play more games it will be difficult for an idle St. Francis to hold onto a Top 10 ranking. DLS drops down to #11 and we drop Jesuit from #6 to #21. But what that does is leave it up to the results. If Jesuit comes back and beats St. Francis we would likely shrug off the San Juan result as a preseason game that's not indicative of where the Marauders really are. If Jesuit struggles in NorCal, we'll see that too, as they have eight games upcoming that are all against ranked opposition, we'll know.
Marvin Ridge jumps up after their North Carolina win. As they won't be playing any further as NC moves to a club system, this is probably as high as they will get. Bixby logged a good opening win and moves up. And we bring in Mira Costa and Servite—both have been lingering around the best teams in SCIRF and while they won't play as school teams any further, they deserve to be noticed.
