Archive For The “Illinois State” Category
I don’t officially vote in any of the FCS Top 25 polls, but I do share who I think deserves to be in the Top 25, and this week, unsurprisingly, I think James Madison was, and still is, the No. 1 team in the nation.
Not exactly going out on a limb, am I?
If you try to pick FCS games, one of the easiest picks of last week was to take the Dukes to upset the Pirates. Pretty much all the experts across the board thought that James Madison, even with some suspended players, was stacked enough to take over rebuilding East Carolina, and boy, did they ever.
Remember the days when FCS vs. FBS matchups were defined by the FCS teams “wilting” in the fourth quarter? With upper-echelon FCS teams like James Madison, that myth has been debunked for a while, but it was brutally apparent in this game, when RB Cardon Johnson easily eluded East Carolina tacklers on two 80+ yard touchdown runs.
That didn’t surprise me at all this weekend. And they’re still my No. 1 team.
I don’t officially vote in any of the FCS Top 25 polls, but I do share who I think deserves to be in the Top 25, and this week, unsurprisingly, I think James Madison was, and still is, the No. 1 team in the nation.
Not exactly going out on a limb, am I?
If you try to pick FCS games, one of the easiest picks of last week was to take the Dukes to upset the Pirates. Pretty much all the experts across the board thought that James Madison, even with some suspended players, was stacked enough to take over rebuilding East Carolina, and boy, did they ever.
Remember the days when FCS vs. FBS matchups were defined by the FCS teams “wilting” in the fourth quarter? With upper-echelon FCS teams like James Madison, that myth has been debunked for a while, but it was brutally apparent in this game, when RB Cardon Johnson easily eluded East Carolina tacklers on two 80+ yard touchdown runs.
That didn’t surprise me at all this weekend. And they’re still my No. 1 team.
You didn’t ask for them, but here’s my pick for this week’s FCS Top 25.
Photo Credit: Chicago Tribune
Illinois State kicker Sean Slattery, right, celebrates with quarterback Koty Thelen after scoring the game-winning field goal as Northwestern running back Justin Jackson, left, reacts. (Nam Y. Yuh/AP)
If you’d like, you can check out my FCS Top 25 vote below.
This week was a huge one in the Missouri Valley conference, as two battles between ranked teams took place.
While North Dakota State beating South Dakota State might not have been surprising, the relative ease of which the Bison dispatched the Jackrabbits was, a 28-7 game that really wasn’t all that close.
And Illinois State, in a true “show-me” game, at least to me, really did show that they are as advertised, beating Northern Iowa 21-13. While controversial RB Marshaun Coprich did play for the Redbirds, his 143 yards and 2 touchdowns were instrumental in their key conference win.
These two wins cleared a logjam in my Top 10 and established two clear frontrunners in the Missouri Valley race.
If you’d like, you can check out my FCS Top 25 vote below.
I don’t ordinarily do do two things with my poll that I actually did this week:
1. I usually don’t demote a team completely out of the Top 25 if they’re a Top 5 team and they lose.
2. I usually don’t demote a team from the No. 1 slot if they win their game.
But that’s exactly what I did, after I looked at my poll with a fresh new set of eyes after some of the more interesting outcomes from the weekend.
I’d been meaning to demote Villanova for some time, not only due to their sort-of lackluster performance over the beginning of the season, but for their seemingly lackluster play going back to last season when Sam Houston upset them in the FCS Round of 8 last season. I was looking for a dominant performance against the worst team on their schedule, Penn, and instead the Quakers upset the Wildcats 24-13.
You could argue that they were getting things done with defense. You could have said that with the loss of their Walter Payton Award-nominated quaterback, QB John Robertson, they’d suffer. But the team that lost this past Thursday, simply, wasn’t a Top 25 team in my opinion. The confluence of all these factors had me dip them out of the Top 25 entirely.
If it’s late May, it’s magazine season.
With the season still three months away – the official kickoff to the FCS football season, North Dakota State at Montana, will be happening on August 29th on ESPN – the big way to whittle away the time is to look at the many FCS Top 25’s that are getting published in airport reading material such as Athlon and The Sporting News.
Preseason Top 25’s are not right or wrong – they’re just one sportswriter’s opinion on the top teams going into the season.
So I figure, I’ve got as good as opinion as anyone else – so why don’t I post my Top 25 here, and let people read that when they go on an airplane this summer and head to the beach, the lake, or wherever their hearts take them?
So here we go: My preseason Top 25, from No. 25 to No. 1. As a added, free bonus, you’ll learn exactly why I put each team where I did.
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My vote for the FCS Top 25 for the week ending 10/20/2012 follows below the flip.Read more ยป
