W is for Wednesday and for Wrestling
There are only one or two GB games today, so attention turns away from the court and things that matter to stuff that could hadly matter less, like the preseason rankings.
As I wrote when I revealed them, I expected them to take a beating and they did. However, I don't regret making Wilson No. 1, nor ranking BE in the Top 10 or Sterling in the Top 20. Or even leaving Cherokee and Lenape out to start. Folks have got to understand that it's not that I don't realize what people are thinking, it's that I don't care what they're thinking and furthermore, it's kind of my job to not care.
Four or five years ago, the C-P Top 20 was actually a Coaches' Poll, and every weekend we'd call anywhere between five and 20 coaches, get their votes and add them up. But because coaches' first responsibility is to their teams, they didn't have time to see a whole lot of squads outside their conferences or pore over the scores in all the papers to make sure they hadn't missed anything. And every few weeks, something wacky would happen, like a team with two losses to another team would still be ranked higher. Then players and parents and coaches and principals and politicians and heads of foreign states and Himalayan sherpas would all call in to bitch about us disrespecting this team or that team, choosing to ignore the fact that all we really did was add up the damn numbers.
So it was decided that if we were going to stand behind the rankings, they had to be ours, not the coaches'. So while everybody else can easily get all hopped up about how this team looked in summer league games or how that team has a girl who dropped once scored 45 in an eighth-grade CYO game, we make decisions based one who's coming back, what the coach says in the preseason information, what their record was the year before and where the program usually ends up at the end of the year. We do all this knowing that we're going to miss some teams, and that the preseason rankings are probably going to get hammered. But we also know that, by the end of the season, the list will likely be more credible than anyone who attacks it because it's based on three months of results, not hype or opinion or rumor or political pressure.
So yes, Cherokee is a good team that deserves to be ranked, but they didn't make the playoffs last year. So maybe BE has some questions to answer, but they have two very good players to start with. And perhaps Sterling and Haddon Township have not, so far, looked like great teams but they both have proven track records.
The one place where I might have believed the hype was Haddon Heights. The cagy Colonial coaches seemed pretty much in agreement that the Garnets were the team to beat, but now I think maybe those picks were a red herring, designed to take pressure off their own teams. In fact, now that I think about it, many of the coaches who identified their squads as "the team to beat" in their division have already been knocked down a peg. They may all yet be proven right, but it just shows that the season holds surprises for us all, even those who know everything.
As I wrote when I revealed them, I expected them to take a beating and they did. However, I don't regret making Wilson No. 1, nor ranking BE in the Top 10 or Sterling in the Top 20. Or even leaving Cherokee and Lenape out to start. Folks have got to understand that it's not that I don't realize what people are thinking, it's that I don't care what they're thinking and furthermore, it's kind of my job to not care.
Four or five years ago, the C-P Top 20 was actually a Coaches' Poll, and every weekend we'd call anywhere between five and 20 coaches, get their votes and add them up. But because coaches' first responsibility is to their teams, they didn't have time to see a whole lot of squads outside their conferences or pore over the scores in all the papers to make sure they hadn't missed anything. And every few weeks, something wacky would happen, like a team with two losses to another team would still be ranked higher. Then players and parents and coaches and principals and politicians and heads of foreign states and Himalayan sherpas would all call in to bitch about us disrespecting this team or that team, choosing to ignore the fact that all we really did was add up the damn numbers.
So it was decided that if we were going to stand behind the rankings, they had to be ours, not the coaches'. So while everybody else can easily get all hopped up about how this team looked in summer league games or how that team has a girl who dropped once scored 45 in an eighth-grade CYO game, we make decisions based one who's coming back, what the coach says in the preseason information, what their record was the year before and where the program usually ends up at the end of the year. We do all this knowing that we're going to miss some teams, and that the preseason rankings are probably going to get hammered. But we also know that, by the end of the season, the list will likely be more credible than anyone who attacks it because it's based on three months of results, not hype or opinion or rumor or political pressure.
So yes, Cherokee is a good team that deserves to be ranked, but they didn't make the playoffs last year. So maybe BE has some questions to answer, but they have two very good players to start with. And perhaps Sterling and Haddon Township have not, so far, looked like great teams but they both have proven track records.
The one place where I might have believed the hype was Haddon Heights. The cagy Colonial coaches seemed pretty much in agreement that the Garnets were the team to beat, but now I think maybe those picks were a red herring, designed to take pressure off their own teams. In fact, now that I think about it, many of the coaches who identified their squads as "the team to beat" in their division have already been knocked down a peg. They may all yet be proven right, but it just shows that the season holds surprises for us all, even those who know everything.
posted by SMc. @ 1:46 PM
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