We took a week off from the college rankings last week in part because it was such a busy week, and in part because there weren't a lot of results and they basically confirmed out expectations.

That wasn't the case for Navy v Central Washington, so fans of the US Naval Academy had to wait an extra week to see how their overtime win over the Wildcats would affect the rankings.

We do have a few changes thanks to that result, plus a few others. We're going to go into detail here a little bit to explain how we got the list we got below. 

#1 - Saint Mary's overachieved. The Gaels really only needed to be close in their games on tour (they won), and needed only to win comfortably against SD State (they won yugely). This is an easy pick.

#2-#4. BYU is still kind of shaky at #2 because they don't play a lot. They play a tough schedule, sure, but not a busy, tough schedule. Still, beating Indiana by almost 30 is something. Cal was imperfect but in control against Penn State (and any other day they would have kicked at least a few conversions and then the scoreline of 35-14 becomes 43-14). Life, on the other hand, was fine against Lindenwood, but they keep having to play Lindenwood.

For 2017-18 we would really like to see Life travel to play someone like Indiana, or Notre Dame College, or Navy, or BYU and Utah, or Saint Mary's and Cal. Heck, Central Washington and Western Washington. Give us something more to go on.

Central Washington drops down because they lost to the #13 team, Navy. The Wildcats' season is built on a house of cards (the cards being victories against Canadian and Washington club teams, and a close win over the University of Victoria). They played BYU, but lost, and in the end, not so close that we're excited. Most of the justification for a CWU #5 ranking was a Feb. 4 win over Lindenwood. Is that enough to negate an overtime playoff loss to Navy? No.

Navy replaces them at #5? No, sorry, can't do that. Navy's loss to Army is too recent (heck, yes you could say Navy was better for 70 minutes and all that, but they lost the game). So Navy has to stay behind Army. Time can make us throw out some old results, and certainly Navy is a new and better team now than they were in November. But can we throw out a 60-36 loss to Penn State and a 37-52 loss to Lindenwood? Maybe if they happened in October, but those results came from November and February. Too much to throw out without a rematch.

So Navy has to stay behind Penn State and Lindenwood. Indiana beat Penn State 29-19 on March 25. Pretty clear hierarchy there. Arkansas State beat Indiana, and beat Navy. They tied Lindenwood. Seems like it would be right to put Arkansas State ahead of Indiana.

Lindenwood? Lindenwood has had a far better schedule, for our purposes, than CWU. They played ranked teams 10 times, going 6-3-1. The tie was Arkansas State. The losses were to Life (twice) and Central Washington. So we could put Lindenwood below Central Washington based on one result, or we could look at how Lindenwood had the more varied college schedule, and beat Navy, who beat CWU.

It's six of one, half a dozen of the other. We decided to put CWU below Navy, Navy below Army, and Lindenwood ahead of Army.

San Diego State drops because they lost a playoff game by over 60 points. UC Davis moves up because they won a playoff game by over 50. The DIAA Spring Final told us that the Western bracket was much stronger than the Eastern. Thus, teams from the East move down, and teams from the West (remember Chico State beat Davis and then lost a close one, Grand Canyon lost a close one to Davis, and WWU lost a close one to GCU) all move up or hold steady.

Baylor got his pretty hard by Arizona, and drop down, and they take LSU with them.