I’m obviously not a voter in any national poll, and this may be a powerfully stupid exercise in futility, but here goes nothing, at least for once. Please provide feedback as to whether you think this is something you’d like to see on a regular basis.
Anyway….
1. BYU. They were quite deservedly #1 last week, and with Pepperdine getting the stuffing kicked out of them this week, they’re sure not falling from the top rank.
2. Stanford. Yeah, I don’t have Irvine on my 2-line. I think they’ve been getting a lot of ‘name’ love. Stanford, however, have had as many or more strong results as anyone in the nation this side of BYU. They’ve got a couple of bad losses already, but so do nearly everyone who have played.
3. Penn State. They haven’t had the strongest of schedules, but two wins at Hawaii’s home invitational, including a sweep of Big Ten brothers Ohio State, together with a 4-0 start at home are pretty strong results. They look to remain the favorites in the EIVA.
4. UC Irvine. I know they’ll be #2 tomorrow. That seems high to me, and frankly even #4 seems a little high, too. Their wins this season have not been dominant and they have really struggled at times too, albeit to quality competition. No one has really jumped up from the next group of teams to prove themselves obviously better, though.
5. UCLA. They were pretty badly outplayed by Stanford in their first match last week, though the sweep of Pacific has to be a shot-in-the-arm for confidence.
6. Pepperdine. This is far enough for them to fall; four ranks is a pretty steep drop. Their body of work is still better than the next few teams’, and there’s every reason to believe they’ll rebound from the Hawaii losses.
7. Long Beach State. I didn’t set out to put the 49ers at the same rank they held last week, but it seems fair considering their results, a very close loss to Irvine and a solid win over UCSD.
8. USC. Much like BYU, no need to change the Trojans’ ranking after they didn’t play a meaningful match this week.
9. CSU Northridge. Practically a copy-and-paste of the LBSU reasoning, though their results this week were less competitive than the 49ers’, both in the bad sense (the loss to Irvine) and the good sense (the win over UCSD).
10. Ohio State. The Buckeyes have had just a single home match so far this year, oddly enough. A 5-2 start, including 4-0 in true road matches (two neutral-court losses in Hawaii) isn’t bad at all considering.
11. Lewis. Yeah. Maybe this is a little hypocritical — I might have them this high chiefly on name value. But I can’t bring myself to move a team up two notches for not playing, or to include Hawaii this high. So Lewis’ two wins last week climb them four spots in the rankings on my hypothetical ballot.
12. California Baptist. I really don’t even want to move a team up one notch for being idle, but with the teams’ results toward the bottom of the poll, it’s hard to get away from.
13. Hawaii. I’m feeling cautiously optimistic about the Warriors. They had two absolutely outstanding results this week, and if they keep it up on the mainland this coming week against Stanford I’ll have plenty of crow to eat.
14. Princeton. Sure they haven’t played yet, but there was a whole poll of teams that hadn’t played at the beginning of the season. Even the first one or two in-season polls had 0-0 teams on them. I’m more confident about Princeton than I am the dregs of the MPSF, anyway.
15. Harvard. They just took the team everyone expects to steamroll their way to the Final Four (and who haven’t lost a conference match since 2008 or 9) to five sets on their home court. Prior to that they won three matches against admittedly weak competition in nine straight sets. Yeah, that means a little more to me than being 1-3 in the MPSF.
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
