Well as we said would happen, the rankings got a shakeup as major conference finals were held.
Some of the things we learned as a result:
Georgetown is indeed very good. The Hoyas beating a strong Villanova team by 46 is a serious result.
Norwich could well still be a national title contender, but they did lose to Vermont, so maybe Vermont is a national title contender.
Loyola's win over Whitewater led us to have a closer look at not only Loyola but also Chicago. UC lost only 15-7 to Loyola in the regular season, so they get a bump. Loyola moves up 19 spots and really during the season we weren't sold on their opposition and what the games they played said to us. Well apparently they were talking and we weren't listening.
East Carolina's significant win over Furman made us take a closer look at ECU's results and we saw that their results against common opponents (Furman and ECU) were comparable. We just saw slightly better scored by Furman, but statistically, in the end, the differences didn't warrant a 22 ranking for Furman and no ranking for ECU. As always, the results correct us.
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*Yes Georgia Tech beat Auburn, and with a little bit of background on their early forfeit and with their tie with Memphis, we looked at ranking them. Better than Auburn? Well the Tigers had already clinched a place in the SCRC final and ran out a mostly reserve side vs Georgia Tech. This is a bit of a delicate thing because when we hear about it after the fact, we tend to discount "we started our B side." But when we're told beforehand it's different. We knew Auburn was resting some players this past week. Having said that, Georgia Tech is probably worthy of being in the Top 40 and that's where they go.
Southeastern Louisiana will be in NCR's small college playoffs, but really they've been looking at themselves as a D2 team. They were thinking about a possible D2 playoff spot but logistics, as much as anything else, kept them as Small. So we made the decision to keep them in the D2 rankings.
