Final Fours are in a week and the line up for D1 women's is interesting. Stanford is there, of course. Penn State too. The two surprises are New Mexico and Davis. I hadn't heard much about New Mexico before now but congrats to them. As for Davis, my feelings are mixed.
I have too many things to say to make a coherent paragraph so I'm just going to list.
1. I'm bitter. Yes, Davis beat us fair and square. However, they got a much easier path to Final Fours than we did last year. We played Air Force, the West #1, on the first day and if we had won we would have played another military school. Davis got to play Virginia and UNI. I'm not saying those were easy games but I don't think it quite holds up to two military schools.
2. If any team from our league besides Stanford deserves to be in Final Fours it's Chico. They're better than Davis but their pool was ridiculous. It had three teams ranked #1 in their league, including Penn State who has been in the final game the past two years, and then Chico who is #2 in PCRFU. How is that fair?
3. PCRFU should have 4 spots in Sweet 16s. Stanford and Chico are consistently two of the top teams in the country. We're good and Davis has proven themselves up to par too. Take seeds away from the South. Why do they have two seeds? They got killed last year and they got killed this year.
4. Why does SoCal only have 1 seed? Again, the South has two. Are you really telling me that the South has better teams than UCSB and UCSD?
5. I don't mean to totally bash on the South but their results both last year and this year demonstrate that their league is just not up there with the rest of the leagues. Every league had at least 1 team advance to the Elite 8 except SoCal and the South. Fold the South into a different league or make them DII. Maybe in a few years they'll be able to compete with the best but right now, they're not cutting it.
6. On Friday, it's going to be Stanford vs. Davis. For the first time in my life I might just root for Stanford.
Good luck to everyone! Yes, even Davis. May the best team win.
2 comments:
I agree with most of what you have posted. Yes, Davis is a good team and I believe that they deserved to go to sweet-16's, but final four!!?? Either they have improved ten-fold in the past month, or else the pool system that USA Rugby has been using is no longer working. How did three of the top four teams in the country end up in the same pool? (Chico, Penn, Army) As a Chico player, yes, I am pretty bitter at the fact that we beat Davis in league 35-0 and now they are playing at final four, but that is life, we lost to Army fair and square. I hope that USA Rugby changes the system for next year, but we will see.
As far as seeds go, I do not really agree with you. If you had been to the tournament and watched UCSB play you would rank the south teams right there with them. They did not play at the caliber of a top 16 team (Cal, I believe you would have done much better). But, do I think that that second south seed should go to the pac-caost? I don't know, because the teams change every year in how competitive they are (which is how USA Rugby needs to view the brackets they hand out). I would not want to send a fourth team from Pac-coast and be embarrassed like the south teams that go every year.
Tara
erugbynews had a great article on how screwy the seeding system is. But I'm definitely cheering for Davis, rather see them in the semis then Stanford. Hey Lee are you going to see the DII games too?
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