With the D1A 15s season done it's time to give you our rankings.
This isn't the official D1A rankings, and because of that we include teams that were in D1A conferences but opted for NCR playoffs or opted out of playoffs. Should those teams have been excluded from the official D1A rankings? We don't really think so because those teams still played their seasons in-conference.
And there are gray areas ... Ohio State backed out of the playoffs, but not at the last minute and so stayed in favor. UCLA backed out, but as a backup to the first backout in the West, Grand Canyon. It's not really UCLA's fault that they were surprised. Texas A&M had to foreit their playoff because they could only host on a Friday and Arkansas State couldn't make it. Ask people another time and they might have said it was Arkansas State's problem and the Red Wolves should forfeit.
Whatever ... we include them all, even St. Bonaventure, Penn State, and Kutztown. We don't include DIAA-level teams, but it's worth pointing out that some of those programs could potentially be good enough to be in this Top 25. We'll see how that all pans out in next year's Rugby East season.
This year's D1A season did suffer from the ripples of COVID (someone should tell California that almost everyone else is behaving normally). It also exposed the raw wound that is the NCR-USA Rugby divide (more likely to come on that very soon). It also showed the flaw in fall-spring absolutism. We get it, the only time to play is the fall, no, the spring, no, fall-to-winter-to-spring. What we did see was a fall-centric team win the championship. We saw a couple of spring-centric teams unable to enter the playoffs as promised. We are also seeing, by the way, that devoting the entire winter/spring to 7s is becoming icnreasingly unpopular. Play 7s? Yeah, great, do it. Play a series of tournaments? Lovely. Spend two or three or four or five months doing it? Too much. Players need 15s games.
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