It's been a few weeks since we updated this ranking as the schedule slowed down around Thanksgiving.
However, we have had UCLA's very successful tour of England and Ireland, and the CRAA Fall Classic.
The Fall Classic bowl game results forced us into some key decisions.
1. Should Life move to #1? The short answer is "yes." While Life did lose to Queens 29-26 on November 2, they also beat Navy 23-20 and Saint Mary's 24-22, that last result being this past weekend. That's a pretty good record. And given that Queens is an NCR D1 finalist, it's not like that result was a major slip for the Running Eagles. Queens also lost to Navy, so if you're looking at the totality of who has currently performed the best against the very top-ranked opponents, Life is 2-1 with a points for-and-against of 73-68; Queens was 1-1 48-65; Navy was 1-1 73-39; Saint Mary's 0-1 22-24. So, yes, it's very close near the top (Lindenwood is saying "ahem ... we exist!"
2. Mount St. Mary's. How good are they? Well if you look at their record this fall, they won every game they should be expected to win, and all of the games that were kind of a pick-'em. Their only losses were to Life, Navy, and Queens. Their victory over Arizona (yes, an Arizona that isn't fully cooked yet) was impressive. So then we looked to see how far they should go. Our big question ended up being, does Mount St. Mary's deserve to be ranked above Army? Well, while they didn't play each other, they did share six common opponents. And they were very close. The winning or losing margins (only loss for each in that list was to Navy) were virtually the same in every game except one. Overall MSM was 5-1 with a points difference for +60 and Army was 5-1 with a PD of +90.
However, what put Mount St. Mary's over the top was the win over Arizona and the 21-19 loss to Life where they could easily have won. What's great about all of this is the Mount has Lindenwood on their schedule next year. So if we've got it wrong, we'll find out.
3. Air Force moves up in part because we hadn't really ever taken into account their win over Colorado, and then their win over SVU was a good result, too.
4. One final note. We had taken a bit of a risk, potentially, in having Arkansas State at #12 and Penn State at #13. Well, guess what? Arkansas State beat Penn State 38-32. Seems about right.
