Been a crazy week for highly-ranked and unbeaten teams. Sunday night San Jose State gives Bakersfield its first loss of the season. Monday Davidson upsets North Carolina, which entered the game ranked as high as second in some polls. Last night Michigan gives Akron just its third loss in three seasons (not counting the PK loss to UVa, of course.) and West Virginia gives top-ranked UConn its first L of the year. And this afternoon St. John's, a consensus top 5, including in the RPI, loses to Villanova 3-1. Adding insult - or irony - to injury, two of 'Nova's goals were scored by Kyle Soroka, whose older brother Ryan left/was run out of St. John's because of clashes with Dave Masur.
Well, Irvine fulfilled that prophecy, losing to UC Davis in OT, 2-1. (In fact, all the BW teams with more wins so far in conference lost to teams with less wins tonight.)
Well, at least if Maryland loses (please no, I am going 11 hours in the car for this), it'll be to a top-class team on the road.
Bring home a victory xpowerout.... Going to be tough with no Sunny and now UNC is coming off a loss. Tea leaves says this doesn't bode well for Maryland but we'll see. I have Md going down 3 - 1 in this one but I have Maryland winniing the ACC tourny. Sasho and the kids will be ready for the tourny. UNC is very good. t.
To continue the trend, UC Irvine - No. 4 in this week's RPI - lost at home last night to UC Davis. That's 1, 4, 5, 6 and 7 in this week's RPI that have lost since the RPI was announced.
Is this, perhaps, an early sign of increasing parity in college soccer based on a wider talent pool of good youth soccer players in the U.S.? Twenty years ago this almost certainly would not have happened, and if it happened ten years ago, it was a very rare week. My sense is that the college game is getting better not only at the top, but across the board.
tman1: Luckily for Maryland, they have impressive depth to deal with the loss of Jane. Kaoru Forbess and Jereme Raley will start on the outside of the midfield. It'll be a little harder to push it forward, but Forbess is great at crosses and getting the ball into traffic.
Interesting to note that the Davidson upset of UNC was probably fueled by the Davidson loss to Longwood University (Farmville, VA) by 2 - 0 (at Davidson) a couple of days earlier (Saturday, 10/15). BTW, the Davidson loss was followed by another 2-0 win by Longwood over UNC Greensboro (10/19)... this must have also been a terrible upset for the UNCG Coach Justin Mullin for him to say the stuff he said in the post game interview: http://www.youtube.com/user/uncgsports?feature=mhee#p/u/0/wSQm_qlU0LI
Maybe the teams at the top are a little overrated and the teams at the bottom don't get enough respect.
true anything can happen in soccer...but I also think that there are a lot more college coaches who play negative soccer and sit 9 player inside the 50yd line to get a result....this makes it very difficult for even the most attacking teams to score.