Week 9 Polls

[wagsabison]

Yepper. NDSU beats a better P5 school, beats EWU, and plays in a better conference. You can't make this stuff up.

Only argument you could make is that EWU lost to a better opponent... but that happens to be NDSU.

[bisonaudit]

Don't get me wrong TSCF as one of my initial starting points for my poll is Sagarin, but you can't completely go by a computer that has a 3-5 team at #3 - especially a 3-5 team that's only wins are against a 1-win FBS team, Southern Illinois, and Missouri St.

I understand the basics of how Sagarin works and why UNI is that high, but that's similar to how you can beat the RPI rankings artificially.

So, UNI has figured out how to game the Sagarin ratings buy strategically losing 4 games every season?

Seems like the more plausible answer could be that humans suffer from a series of biases that may lead us to less than optimal conclusions under certain conditions. Not the Sagarin or any computer rating system should be taken as gospel, but there their to help us correct for things that we're generally poor at recognizing for ourselves.

[Professor Chaos]

At this point in time EWU's FBS win over Wash St.trumps our Iowa win! I think voters are taking into consideration how the Bison are winning ...by the hair of their chinny chin chin....If we run the table and don't get a top 2 seed well, then we have something to complain about.

The problem with this logic is they dropped NDSU from #1 to #4 for losing by the hair of their chinny chin chins to SDSU. If these voters are going to discount the wins because they're close they should be discounting the loss as well. I don't think they should discount either.

The truth is these "major" national FCS polls just slot vote, especially by this time of year. No team moves up unless a team in front them loses and, by the same token, no team moves down unless they lose. However, the selection committee is different. At the end of the 2011 regular season, due to the week 11 loss to YSU, NDSU was #4 in both "major" polls behind Georgia Southern and UNI (who I'm sure, as you'd recall, the Bison had beaten less than a month before that) but they were seeded #2. GSU was #3 (and their fans sure didn't like it) and UNI was seeded #5 with Montana being #4.

Like I said before, Thursday afternoon when the selection committee releases their first top 10 ranking is going to be very interesting.

[FCS Nation]

In my vote in the Stats Poll I have kept y'all at #1 and I am not one of the 3 #1 votes for The Citadel. Believe me I would love to vote the Cadets #1 but I take my responsibility VERY seriously.

[NDSUstudent]

I do have some concerns with the committee...I remember a few years back they seeded UNH ahead of NDSU because they had lost earlier in the season. Yes, that was really the logic they used. That said we didn't beat UNH that year, even though we did crush them in the semifinals the season before. We should be seeded over EWU.

[Christopher Moen]

Only argument you could make is that EWU lost to a better opponent... but that happens to be NDSU.

It could also be argued that NDSU beat themselves a bit in the SDSU game.

[MrSnuffleupagus]

On my AGS poll, I have EWU #1 and NDSU #2. If they could come into Fargo, arguably the toughest place to play in FCS football, and go to overtime (they could have won it in regulation remember), who's to say they wouldn't win on a neutral field or at their place? The rest of my top five is #3 Citadel, #4 JSU, and #5 SHSU.

So you're rankings are based off of 'well, they maybe could beat us if they were home'?

I find it funny that people rank a team that NDSU beat, above NDSU.

[CAS4127]

So you're rankings are based off of 'well, they maybe could beat us if they were home'?

I find it funny that people rank a team that NDSU beat, above NDSU.

So we shouldn't be ranked above SDSU?

[Vet70]

So we shouldn't be ranked above SDSU?

Only if they were 7-1.

[MrSnuffleupagus]

So we shouldn't be ranked above SDSU?

Is SDSU 7-1? If they are, sure.


The fact of the matter is they are not. They are 5-3. EWU is 7-1, as are we. If you are comparing two teams that are both 7-1 and one of those team's loss is to the other team you're comparing; they are the better ranked team. This should be hard to understand...