Men Fall DI College Rankings Week #7

Not too many changes in the Men's DI fall rankings, however, one result has us making a shift for two entire conferences.

With Army's emphatic win over Air Force, Air Force gets bumped down, and because Air Force gets bumped down, so, too, do the other teams from the West DIA. In addition, Navy, which lost to Air Force by a single point (on the road) gets pulled down, too. Now, Navy could have stayed higher, but the Midshipmen have a fairly quiet fall - tough games, but not a lot of them, and they needed one more tough game to get out of Air Force's gravitational pull. They can do that next weekend with their game against Penn State. While Penn State will split their squad and play St. Joseph's also, we still think a good outing from Navy will (to use another metaphor) release some ballast.

So AFA, Colorado State, and Navy drop. Who benefits? Well Bowling Green has won impressively over everyone, and since Davenport beat Arkansas State, BGSU's 29-20 loss to the Panthers reflects quite well on the Falcons. So combine that with BGSU's fantastic MAC playoff efforts, and they move up. Same goes for James Madison. This is a case where we've essentially thrown out one of their losses, saying they're better now than they were. JMU is pretty darned good, that's sure.

Inertia as much as anything else sees Wisconsin, Ohio State, AIC, and Bowling Green move up the line. And so we come to Wheeling Jesuit and Kutztown. Kutztown almost beat Penn State this past weekend, losing 41-36. We looked at that, and the fact we had bumped KU past WJU, and wondered if we should throw out the WJU 33-20 win over KU from earlier this fall.

So, when in doubt, go to the data. Kutztown and Wheeling Jesuit played each other, and also have had six other common opponents. In three of those six games, Kutztown had the better result. In three, it was Wheeling Jesuit. Add to that the fact that Wheeling Jesuit actually beat KU, you'd think WJU was the better team (four better results to three). However, it's also worth noting that the difference in points is markedly on Kutztown's side. If you include the WJU v KU game, KU's points difference in those seven games is 180, WJU -180 ... a huge difference. So we could put KU ahead of the Wheeling Jesuit. We could ... but we won't. Not now. We'd love to see one or both of these teams play a bowl game (c'mon guys). 

We're still waiting on Tennessee and Kentucky. Would be nice to see them play out of their conference. The same goes for Baylor. Out of the top 50, Central Florida, Georgia, and maybe someone else from the SIRC could break in soon.