What a weekend.
Saint Mary's beat Cal Poly 43-38. Central Washington beat UCLA 47-41. Navy beat Penn State 29-26. Arizona beat BYU 32-22. So much fun. We're very happy to have been at UCLA vs CWU in-person.
The close games certainly opened up the door for some of the teams that lost to still move up. But we're also a bit hamstrung by some previous results. Penn State, we think, has improved. We haven't seen Arkansas State of late, so right now Penn State moves past ASU despite the Red Wolves having beaten the Nittany Lions in the CRAA Fall Classic in December. That was a six-point game, so we're moving PSU up anyway.
Arizona could have moved up after a well-taken win over BYU. However, Arizona already lost to UCLA, and UCLA just lost to Central Washington. At the same time, Arizona did lose to Mount St. Mary's in the CRAA Fall Classic. Now, we do think Arizona is stronger than they were, but their loss wasn't three points or six points, it was 25. So we can put aside that result, but we need more. Conveniently, we have Arizona at Army and Saint Mary's at UCLA, which should mix things up a bit.
We could say that beating BYU was more of a big deal than losing to UCLA. We could look at CWU beating UCLA who beat Arizona. We could look at Arizona losing to Saint Mary's by two points, and CWU losing by 20. In the end we're going to reward Cal Poly as much as we can for a close loss.
We're going to reward Central Washington for the road win over UCLA.
And, oh yeah, we make the different decision regarding Navy and Life this week compared to last week. Last week we said, let's overlook the Navy loss to Life. This week we look at it. That's because while Navy did beat Cal, Life beat Lindenwood, and then Navy was pushed by Penn State. The truth is that it's a very close Top 15—not all of them could be #1 but quite a few could.
(By the way, Colorado State vs Colorado was kind of a low-key game but we've listed it because it backs up our rankings.)
