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BG Ranked Ahead Of WV?
By Matt Sussman | Sep 4, 2008 | Filed Under Bowling Green, Football
After that oh-so-sweet win over the Pittsburgh Wannstedts on Saturday, I figured a couple of Associated Press voters to throw a couple of farthings the Falcons’ way. And sure, ’nuff, it happened. They have 17 votes, putting them 33rd, ahead of Virginia Tech. The people who voted for ‘em?
Bret Bloomquist, El Paso Times: 25th
Mike DeArmond, Kansas City Star: 25th
Joe Rexrode, Lansing State Journal: 25th
Michigan. Texas. And Missouri. (And Kansas, kind of!) Anyone else?
Scott Wolf, LA Daily News: 21st
Awright, 21st! That’s five whole poll points! And from a man in California no less! Surely nobody would go above th…
Adam Van Brimmer, Savannah Morning News: 17th
Um. Really? Seventeenth? I mean, hey, big Falcon support here, but 17th? Higher than when they were 8-0 in 2002, when they were 20th? Was Pittsburgh Van Brimmer’s sleeper pick to make a BCS game?
It should also be noted that he put BG ahead of West Virginia (actually 8th), Wisconsin (11th), Arizona State and BYU (15th). I guess the old Daytonian proverb is true. Nothing is more refreshing than to have a team from Ohio do something in Pittsburgh and have it felt in Georgia, and nowhere else.
Breakdown of AP voters ◼ Associated Press
Tags: adam van brimmer, ap football poll, bowling green
All of this would be well and good…well, yeah, 17th is actually absurdly high…but for the fact that, as one commenter has said on this site already, Pittsburgh probably shouldn’t have been ranked.
This is not to say that BG is a bad team…I can’t say that. Nor is this to say that BG shouldn’t be favored over Minnesota this Saturday (although Minnesota might have beaten a “better than you think” NIU team this past Saturday, and thus warrant consideration for a better Big 10 finish this year).
No, I merely say that I feel, much as I felt last year when Appalachian State beat Michigan, that beating a ranked team doesn’t entirely mean that you should now be ranked. Maybe the originally ranked team (Pitt here) really just wasn’t that good to begin with. Maybe the unranked team just wanted it more. I mean, didn’t Pitt beat West Virginia last year, and weren’t most commentators completely unable to explain that?