Today we rank the women's college 7s teams we've seen in the recent weeks and it's a pretty easy pick for #1.

Big surprise, Lindenwood is #1 and big surprise, Life is #2. The only blip for Life is their one loss to Army, but in 7s especially we end up putting aside the odd close loss because a team moves on from that loss. Life lost an early game to Army, and then went on to have better results against common opponents. In the end, we see Life's two relatively competitive losses to Lindenwood as meaning a lot, and since Army lost to Dartmouth, who were shut out twice by Lindenwood, we feel the totality of the experience is that Life is, overall, stronger than Army.

Army did lose to Dartmouth, albeit in a close game, and we could have flipped it all around the other way and said that Army beat Life and that means more than their loss to Dartmouth. This is an especially compelling argument because Army beat Life three tries to two, while Army's loss to Dartmouth was two tries to two, and decided on conversions. But ... Dartmouth also beat Harvard and overall, by our observations, we feel they were stronger by a small margin.

Where are the 3rd and 4th teams in the CRC? The difference between them and Life and Lindenwood were pretty stark. We watched them all and just objectively saw the R7CC teams as, overall, stronger—witness how Penn State did in the CRC and in the R7CC. 

Claremont Colleges was a team we pondered over and we could have ranked them a bit lower. Overall their results are similar to those of Grand Canyon, Northern Iowa, and Notre Dame College. Any of those could have been #14 ... or even above Princeton or Stanford. We do think that Davenport and Navy, despite being in the Red Division in the R7CC, were strong 7s teams.

Virginia Tech. VT did not do so well in the R7CC but got some wins in the CRC. Playing in both can result in improvement. Life played a bit better against Lindenwood and were in a better position to win in that second game. Penn State played a bit better. Virginia Tech made some significant improvements. And their results before included splitting with Air Force, and a close loss to Princeton (as well as one to Northeastern). The result in New Orleans was wins over UC Davis and Iowa (a team we think is possibly #21), and they lost very close games to Northern Iowa and Grand Canyon. 

VT is ranked below Northeastern due to a loss, but above Air Force because Air Force's win over Virginia Tech was closer (five points) than their loss (24 points). Northeastern and Air Force were both shut out by Davenport, and Virginia Tech scored twice. In the end, by the way, Virginia Tech went 3-6, and of their six losses, four were by a try or less, and another was 15-5. There are teams who could argue they should be #18, #19, or #20.  

Roger Williams makes the rankings based mostly on us watching them and they appeared to be playing some real 7s. There is no real crossover between their opponents and those from other divisions or competitions. So in the end it's a nod to a team that did the best it could in the competition it was in, and we don't see a ton of difference between the top of the Club/Red divisions and the lower end of the PRemier/Gold divisions.