Well we've been complaining about it most of the season ...
Whine, whine, whine ... no upsets, no surprises. Well then there was this past weekend.
OK, to be fair, there weren't a ton of upsets, but we did get three worth noting: Salisbury beat Virginia, an upset we thought we might see. Towson beat Scranton, which was an upset we should have seen as a possibility, and kind of thought about it, but didn't say anything. Chicago beat Marquette, which was an upset we didn't think would happen at all, and, again, should have seen it coming.
So that's #16 over #9, #17 over #8, and #28 over #18. What we've done with that is basically move those winning teams up and the losing teams down, but we're mindful that all of the games were fairly close (winning margins of 11, 5, and 9). Towson and Salisbury move up four spots, whole the teams they beat move down nine. Chicago moves up seven spots while Marquette drops six.
The reason Virginia and Scranton move so far down is that many of the teams in the top 17 spots won. In fact, of those teams, one was idle, one won by forfeit, and 13 won ... the only teams to lose were UVA and Scranton. Should we tell Montana State or Mankato they need to drop down? Seems a bit harsh at this point in the season.
Another question we dealt with was RPI. They lost on a last-second penalty goal to #6 Marist. We used the closeness of this game to nudge Marist down to #8, which is where we think they really are. But should RPI move down also? In many such cases a team like that, ranked #19 and losing by 3 points to #6, would move up. But we don't think we can move RPI past those teams that won conference playoff games, or even Scranton and UVA (there's a limit to how far down we bump them). And with the Liberty semis and final coming up, RPI still has a chance to make some gains. So they end up dropping one spot because we moved Northwestern from #27 to #19. We're not thrilled about it, but there it is.
