With a win over St. John’s Saturday afternoon, it looks likely that the Hoyas will return to the Associated Press’ Top 25 for the first time since Jan. 7, when they were ranked No. 19. Not only did Georgetown notch two Big East wins this week, several of the other teams vying with the Blue and Gray for a spot in the rankings faltered.
Filed under Polls …
Men’s Soccer Cracks National Top 10
After their weekend sweep of Ivy League opponents Princeton and Penn, Georgetown has risen to the #9 spot in the national college soccer rankings, moving up three spots from #12 in last week’s polls.
Head Coach Brian Wiese’s team is 7-0-1 to start its 2012 campaign, a record that marks the best start in the program’s long history.
The sole draw came two weekends ago at Wisconsin, when senior midfielder Ian Christianson scored in the 68th minute to erase GU’s early deficit. The game-winner would just manage to elude the Hoyas over the course the final 22 minutes, however, and Coach Wiese told me on Sunday after the Penn win that that UW tie actually still stings a bit for his guys. No joke.
McCabe Earns League Honor
Senior linebacker Robert McCabe became the first major preseason award winner on Georgetown’s football team since 2001 after he was named Patriot League preseason defensive player of the year Wednesday morning.
McCabe, who was also named to the all-Patriot League first team, set a Georgetown single-season record with 134 tackles last season, good enough to lead the conference with an average of 12.2 tackles per game.
“It’s a well-deserved honor for Robert,” Head Coach Kevin Kelly said in a statement. “We all know that he’s the best defensive player in the Patriot League and it’s an honor that he’s being recognized by the other coaches and media around the league as an impact player.”
Watching the Hoyas in the Rankings
While the National Rankings are always suspect, and are a very imperfect measure of just how good each team is, here are the latest rankings for the Hoyas:
AP Poll: T-23rd
ESPN/USA Today Coaches’ Poll: 23rd
RPI: 7th (Yup, even at 14-5, the Hoyas are still one spot ahead of current No. 1 Ohio State, ranked 8th in the RPI)
Here’s a pretty cool link that shows how the Hoyas and the rest of the schools in the Big East rose and fell in the AP Rankings
Hoyas Ranked 11th, But Not on Everyone's Ballot
There might be a few questions about some AP ballots. File Photo:Lindsay Anderson/The Hoya
The new polls came out today and the Hoyas dropped one spot to 11th in the AP and three spots to 13th in the Coaches poll. While it seems most pollsters are reluctant to give up on the Hoyas even with three wins in their last seven games, some are already jumping ship.
Pollspeak, a site which lists and compares all of the ballots of AP voters, showed that the vast majority had the Hoyas somewhere between ninth (their highest ranking on the current ballot) and 16th. Just five of the 65 ballots had the Hoyas below 16th. Two pollsters kept the Hoyas unranked this week, however, and one of those two is John Feinstein of The Washington Post.
Feinstein is technically a national voter for NPR as The Examiner’s Craig Stouffer (Hoyas at 12 this week) gets DC’s vote. Feinstein dropped the Hoyas out of the Top 25 after ranking them 16th last week. 16th was the third-lowest any voter had the Hoyas last week. Ahead of the Hoyas on his ballot this week are Cornell, which lost to Penn 10 days ago, Texas, which has lost 6-of-10 games, Gonzaga, which just lost to Loyola Marymount (not the 1990 team) and Maryland.
Before any accusations of Georgetown prejudice gets thrown at Feinstein, however, it is important to note that in week 14, before the loss to Rutgers, he had the Hoyas at No. 8 in the poll, which was par for the course, considering they were ranked seventh. If anything, Feinstein’s vote may just be a sign that memories of last season’s collapse are fresh in some minds.
Fortunately for the Hoyas, the rest of the AP voters haven’t decided to sell their Georgetown stock just yet. A win on the road at Louisville may put the Hoyas back on Feinstein’s ballot, but a loss could also force other voters to follow Feinstein’s lead and drop them.
Hoyas Slip to No. 10 in Poll
Georgetown fell from No. 7 to No. 10 in the latest AP poll following a loss to barely-.500 Rutgers. Because the Hoyas stayed among the nation’s best 10 teams, Thursday’s game against No. 5 Syracuse will be yet another top-10 matchup.
The Hoyas are 2-1 in games this year in which both teams are ranked in the top 10. They lost to Syracuse (No. 7 GU vs. No. 4 Cuse) and beat Duke (No. 7 GU vs. No. 8 Duke) and Villanova (No. 7 GU vs. No. 2 Nova).
The Big East still has four of the nation’s top 10 teams, down slightly from the last two weeks when they had four in the top seven. In addition to Georgetown and Syracuse, Villanova is third and West Virginia is eighth.
Pittsburgh is ranked 19th and Marquette received votes in the poll.