Photo from The Daily Herald
I started to say, “at least the Seahawks won”…but it would be more accurate to say that the Vikings lost. Luckily, there’s already a recap of the Wake Forest game up so I feel no need to pour salt into any open wounds. So let’s start the weekly roundup with the RPI summary table:
Items of Note
Back in the days of 7 to 9 conference teams, upsets seemed to happen a lot more often than we’ve seen over the last several years. But the first week saw quite a few with UVa losing twice to teams projected into the bottom third of the conference to go along with Clemson over L’ville on Sunday.
GT’s big win propelled them to “IN” status, at least for today.
Clemson starts the conference season 3-1 with wins at Syracuse and home against FSU and the big upset over L’ville….to go along with their normal loss at UNC. But throw in an OOC SOS ranking of #301 and you still end up with a miserable RPI ranking.
Virginia struggles on the road against both Techs to start conference play 1-2…matching their total conference losses in each of the last two years. That poor start makes it unlikely that the ‘Hoos will win the regular season for the third straight year.
Syracuse got Boeheim back but they still lost at home to UNC to bring up the bottom of the ACC at 0-4.
RPI Trends
You wouldn’t expect to see many trends developing in a little over a week’s worth of action, but I like to see the graphs anyway.
It’s a little surprising that UVa hasn’t dropped any further. They must have started with a pretty good lead in the actual RPI calculation such that their ranking didn’t drop too far with two losses.
If you look at the bottom, you can see that GT managed to just sneak into the trend graph.
Pitt is 13-1 so far this year with their only loss to Purdue on Dec 1. Playing MD-Eastern Shore produced a dip even though they won. Wins against GT at home and at ND put them in good standing so far. Their Top-50 wins are against Davidson, GT, and ND….so I’m not quite ready to bet the farm on Pitt. But it looks like they should be heading back to the NCAAT this year.
Now for the Bubble:
GT’s climb came from a loss @Pitt and their win at home against UVa. This may be their peak for the year, but for today it doesn’t suck to be a Yellow Jacket fan.
FSU shows the roller coaster effect that we often see at this time of the year. But this one is a little unique in that they are currently in a three-game losing streak. Rising rank with a loss on the road to Miami just proves that they got beat by a better team than others in 70-100 RPI ranking range.
ACC Standings
I don’t normally look at the standings this early in the season, but I was a little surprised at how stratified the ACC was when I pulled up the standings last Friday. After Thursday night’s games there were 6 teams without a conference win. The State/WF game was going to reduce that to 5…but then GT over UVa dropped it to 4 winless teams.
Four un-beaten teams, four winless teams and four others with the same losing record…I could say a lot more, but most of it has already been said multiple times.
Upcoming Games
Thankfully, there were no Monday games this week. Those play heck with the relevance of a conference summary posted on Monday morning or afternoon.
