We are just about at the end of the NCR D1 season and the #1 team got knocked off last week.
Brown just played poorly in a game where they needed to play really well. Why is that? Can we point to a Liberty Conference that is not as challenging as the ARC? Maybe. Can we point to the fact that Brown had played one game in the previous month? Yes, for sure. They had a bye weekend, and then they had a weekend off while other conferences played their playoff games, and then they had a bye through the play-ins.
Maybe that didn't help so much.
But also St. Bonaventure played very well, and certainly benefited from a tough road through the ARC. And of course the ARC ended up winning all of the playoff games.
And that's because they play tough games every week and added that final placement weekend which meant they weren't idle too long. Is the ARC's overall quality a holdover from playing in the Rugby East until this year? Maybe a little, but these teams have put together very good programs. The question is, can they hold onto that standard as the years go on. Hard to speculate. Instead, we just look at last week.
Last week, then, #3 beat #1, which isn't such a big surprise, but of course 51-7 is quite surprising. One could say we should drop Brown down further than #3 but we have a hard time throwing out all that they've done. In addition, our #4, Walsh, won a very close game over #5 Marian (yeah, the rankings had that one right). Should we drop Brown below Marian? We don't think so.
Biggest mover is Belmont Abbey, and since they're in the semis, they could move up further. We'll see.
