4/2 Division III Power Rankings

I promise next week I will get this thing out on a Tuesday, like this was planned.  At least this is at 9:30 AM instead of this afternoon.  Please be aware that yesterday’s matches probably are not taken into account with these rankings, although there was really nothing surprising that happened yesterday.  One thing that I’d like to point out in these rankings is that after #20, the rankings really just become crazy-town.  There’s a lot of debate there and we are seeing some teams that we are normally down on moving up in the rankings for almost no apparent reason.  I would hate to be on the rankings committee right now and luckily, we just do power rankings so it can be a little bit subjective!  Rankings below:

Notable Moves:

Emory, Up 2 Spots – The Eagles follow up their awesome weekend with a nice two spot bump in the power rankings.  Two spots when you’re already #7 is a big deal, so this was a nice move for them into the top 5.  It looks like these guys are hitting their stride at the right time: the end of the season.

Middlebury, Down 4 Spots – When someone moves up, someone else has to move down.  Middlebury didn’t have the weekend everyone hoped they’d have by losing to Emory, but they still beat a solid Kenyon team pretty easily to come away with a decent weekend.  It looks like they got the benefit of the doubt in previous rankings, but now they have to prove it to move back up into the elite teams.  Given that this was the first real matchplay for the Panthers, I wouldn’t be too worried if I were a Panthers fan.

Chicago, Up 11 Spots – What in the world?! For a blog that is usually pretty tough on Chicago, this is a team that moved up 11 whole spots despite not doing anything this weekend.  Why?  Cal Lutheran crushed Whittier, and Chicago has an indirect over them.  Chicago also has wins over DePauw and Denison as well.  They do have an ugly loss to UWW, but at this point everyone has lost to everyone.

DePauw, Up 14 Spots – Well, if we wanted to move up Chicago, then we’d have to move up DePauw.  DePauw has one loss to Chicago but has also beaten UWW, Colby, and NCW.  Not to mention they played Kenyon fairly close this weekend to the tune of a 5-3 loss.  They may not be ranked this high in the ITA rankings, but right now they are playing hot and are rewarded in our rankings.

RPI, Up 9 Spots – The commenters get their wish! RPI has officially moved into our top 30 by beating a reeling Skidmore team this weekend, 5-4.  Until someone beats RPI, they most likely will stay in our power rankings.  Despite not being a huge fan of the team, they certainly deserve this and come in ranked at #27.

Skidmore, Wesleyan, Out of Rankings – Bad weekends for both of these teams have the bloggers down on them.  Skidmore lost 5-4 to RPI, which was a dismal loss, and Wesleyan came out with an even worse performance by losing 8-1 to Tufts.  That’s not a top 30 performance and it’s a bit disappointing considering how high SOME PEOPLE were on Wesleyan previously.

Notable Differences:

D3ASouth’s Middlebury Ranking – I’ll justify this as this being a “prove it” ranking.  They played tough with Emory on the road in their first match of the season and destroyed Kenyon easily on a neutral court.  However, their only win is Kenyon and I can no longer be putting too much weight into D3NorthEast’s Kool-Aid.

D3Northeast’s Williams Ranking – Why does it always seem to be D3NE that has the differences in rankings?  Because he loves his region, that’s why.  Williams has no big losses on the year and have already gritted out two 5-4 wins.  That can be seen as either a strength or a weakness.  Three writers think it’s a weakness, one thinks it’s a strength.  We’ll see how Williams fares when the NESCAC comes around.

D3West’s Trinity TX Ranking – Trinity TX is one of our favorite teams.  They play solid doubles, train a lot, have a great twitter account, and are pretty nice dudes too.  However, we haven’t seen them in action in a while and I think that’s hurting their ranking a little bit.  They’ll be back to see if they can prove 3 of our writers they belong in the Final 4.