Last week, Matt Vautour, the beat writer who covers Massachusetts for The Daily Hampshire Gazette of Northampton, Mass., decided to conduct his own unofficial updated Atlantic 10 media poll of the conference's men's basketball teams.
Because of how many teams have had surprising starts, Vautour wanted to know how beat writers of other A-10 schools would rank the conference teams after seeing most of the nonconference schedule completed.
Vautour released the results Sunday and there were several interesting changes. Xavier and Rhode Island both remained at the top, but four schools originally ranked sixth through 11th – Dayton, UMass, Charlotte and Duquense – made dramatic jumps. Charlotte (10th in the preseason), Duquesne (11th in the preseason) and UMass (eighth in the preseason) all improved four spots moving to sixth, seventh and fourth, respectively. Dayton moved from sixth (preseason) to third (updated), and this poll was mostly completed before the Flyers' upset of No. 6 Pittsburgh.
Fordham, which returned all five starters this season, made the biggest movement down. The Rams started the year ranked fourth in the preseason and have moved to ninth.
Poll results
Team: preseason, updated ranking
Xavier: 1, 1
Rhode Island: 2, 2
Dayton: 6, 3
UMass: 8, 4
Saint Joseph's: 3, 5
Charlotte: 10, 6
Duquesne: 11, 7
Saint Louis: 5, 8
Fordham: 4, 9
Temple: 9, 10
George Washington: 7, 11
Richmond: 12, 12
St. Bonaventure: 14, 13
La Salle: 13, 14
-- Jim Utter
Monday, December 31, 2007
Reexamining Atlantic 10 media poll
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1 comments:
I hope we're in the top half when the season ends. We play very hard and very team-oriented, but have so much trouble scoring the ball. That we're 8-4 and shooting 38% or so is remarkable.
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