AVCA Top 25 (9/19/23)

The AVCA has released their Week 3 Top 25 Poll and nothing has really changed. I predicted that we would not have a team drop from the rankings and that’s what happened. Juniata remains in first with 85 first place votes (up one) and 2,149 adjusted points. 2,150 is the perfect score when it comes to these rankings so it means one voter had Juniata in second. Hope stayed in second and received the other first place vote with UW-Oshkosh remaining in third. There was, once again, a big gap from 3rd to 4th but this week that team is Calvin instead of CMS who swapped spots.

My rankings differ with the AVCA on just one team. The AVCA has Gustavus Adolphus while I have Ohio Wesleyan. OWU have a better overall win (Calvin) in my opinion than GAC (Coe?) but they have better losses. GAC plays Northwestern tomorrow so that should help me with next week’s rankings. WashU fell out of the Top 10 dropping 5 spots making them the biggest faller this week with NYU moving up one spot to join the Top 10. The biggest risers this week were UW-Whitewater, Cornell, Wesleyan and Mt St Joseph all moving up 3 spots.

For Region X, we have CMS (5), Trinity (11) and La Verne (23) in the Top 25. In the receiving votes category, we have UC Santa Cruz, Puget Sound, Colorado College and Southwestern. (Thanks to the select few that did that for me.)

I counted 76 actual voters this week, which is actually a pretty high number historically. I saw quite a few voters who hadn’t previous voted weeks 1 or 2 so I imagine a sternly worded memo went out from the AVCA to get this done.

I was looking through the voter’s ballots a bit and there are at least a couple of coaches that are using my Top 25 as a baseline and making minor modifications from it. Thank you for that bit of respect (or random bit of luck). On the flip side, and I’ve reported this before in past years, we have Swarthmore’s Head Coach Harleigh Chwastyk that still votes ONLY on winning percentage. Her Top 10 includes undefeated teams La Verne, Mary Washington, UW-Stout and Williams. One loss Mary Hardin-Baylor shows up at 13 but ETBU, who just beat them is left out. AVCA Top 10 team CMS is left off her ballot. There is also no Trinity or WashU. I will say some original thought was used because undefeated teams Eastern Nazarene, North Central and Ramapo were left off. Also of note, her one-loss team was on her ballot weeks one and two but not this week. To each their own.