Don't Believe The Hype, Just Play

Coaches polls (coaches "KNOW" quality when they see it, right?) are worthless. Most coaches watch their own team and only occasionally study opponents for quality. Coaches don't have time to review the hours of video that would be required to make an informed evaluation of teams. If anything, the voting should include maybe 100 coaches to attempt to get a more accurate predictor, not the paltry few that Soccer Times uses.

It is interesting, too, that 10 of the 16 coaches have their own team on the list. I think that I trust more the votes of those coaches who DON'T have their team in contention to be honest in their evaluation, if they are paying attention at all.

Now my final criticism is based on the actual 2006 winner of the men's NCAA championship: UC- Santa Barbara. In this the final regular season poll, UC-SB came in ranked 29th. I would bet that almost none of the coaches voting had ever seen them play. I call on Soccer Times to add at least 80 coaches to the current list of 16, and include some NCAA division two and three coaches since they play some of those teams. There is wisdom in crowds, if you haven't read.

Or better yet, dispense with coaching polls altogether and pay a few guys to study this and be a LOT more realistic with the polling.

Note to players: Better Soccer players take zero pride in their team being highly ranked, since it is meaningless. Better soccer players enjoy playing soccer, not trying to measure a very difficult thing to measure like future soccer team success.

Tuesday, November 7, 2006 (Records include games of Monday, November 6) (First-place votes in parentheses)

Rank	School	Record	Pts	LW
1	Southern Methodist (9)	17-1-4	390	2
2	Duke (7)	16-3-1	385	6
3	Wake Forest	15-3-3	371	1
4	Virginia	14-3-1	351	4
5	Indiana	14-4-2	312	6
6	West Virginia	15-2-3	308	3
7	Maryland	15-4-1	303	5
8	Santa Clara	12-4-4	256	9
9	California	12-5-1	246	10
10	Notre Dame	13-5-2	229	11
11	Clemson	12-4-2	220	7
12	Saint Louis	13-4-2	206	12
13	New Mexico	13-3-3	166	17
14	North Carolina	11-5-3	160	23
15	UCLA	10-5-4	159	18
16	Lehigh	15-1-2	129	15
17	Creighton	13-4-3	127	20
18	Kentucky	14-5-2	111	14
19	St. John's	13-5-2	103	nr
20	Illinois-Chicago	12-2-5	100	16
21	Towson	14-1-3	95	21
22	Harvard	13-4-0	78	23
23	Alabama at Birmingham	10-6-3	56	24t
24	Connecticut	10-6-2	42	24
25	South Carolina	11-5-1	41	19

Key: Pts - Total points. LW - Last week's ranking. t - tie. nr - no ranking

Dropped out: No. 22 California-Irvine, No. 25t Providence.

Others receiving votes: California-Irvine 39, Old Dominion 35, Hofstra 25, California-Santa Barbara 22, Northern Illinois 22. Providence 19, Rhode Island 16, Monmouth 15, Washington 13, San Francisco 10, Western Illinois 10, Cincinnati 9, Rutgers 8, Brown 7, San Diego State 5, Ohio State 3.

Voting panel: Louis Bennett, Marquette; Mark Berson, South Carolina; Sasho Cirovski, Maryland; Ian Collins, Kentucky; Dan Donigan, Saint Louis; Jeremy Fishbein, New Mexico; Mike Freitag, Indiana; Mike Getman, Alabama at Birmingham; Kevin Grimes, California; Schellas Hyndman, Southern Methodist; Mike Jacobs, Evansville; Paul Krumpe, Loyola Marymount; Ken Lolla, Louisville; Ray Reid, Connecticut; John Rennie, Duke; Bob Warming, Creighton.