DNN Releases August 2010 Power Rankings
With only 15 games this month involving a Power Ranked team, it's very much the calm before the storm in summer as we get ever closer to the beginning of tournament season. In July, we had 11 hits and 4 misses, two on close ones (Tampa 104, #22 Dallas 101 and #11 Windy City 121, #10 Boston 115) and two in surprising blowouts (#25 Brewcity 148, #23 North Star 68 and Providence 171, #24 Nashville 82.) For those playing along at home, that puts us at 73% accuracy for the month and 85% accuracy for the year.
There's very little movement in this month's Power Rankings release -- the only move above #22 comes in the #10 and #11 slots, as Windy City moves back into the top ten with their narrow win over previous #11 Boston. There's a lot going on at the bottom of the chart, though, as three of those aforementioned upsets all affect the slots right at the cutoff.
Previous #25 Brewcity moves up to #22 with that convincing defeat of previous #23 North Star, sending NSRG right back off the chart after they returned from a one-month absence in June. Meanwhile, Providence benefits from their 89-point pounding of previous #24 Nashville and returns to the charts for the first time since September 2009 at #23.
Appearing for the first time ever on the Power Rankings are #24 Jet City and #25 Tampa Bay. Tampa Bay moves in on the strength of a narrow 104-101 win over Dallas at July's Rocket City Rumble; Jet City, although they got pummeled by #1 Oly in July, enters on the strength of their solid 54-point May win over Arch Rival (Tampa Bay lost to Arch Rival in a 5 point squeaker at the same event.)
Dallas and Nashville join North Star in slipping off the chart for September. Nashville hasn't had an impressive win against a tough opponent since February's defeat of Atlanta, and Dallas, while pursuing a very busy schedule that's seen them play 17 sanctioned games so far this year, had been seeing increasingly small margins of victory against regional rival Tampa Bay before finally losing in July.
Normally, this is where we'd put our "On the Rise" section, but all the teams that we'd put here actually got into the rankings proper this time -- Providence, Jet City and Tampa Bay. No Coast has quietly put together a 5 game winning streak recently, but mostly over fairly unsuccessful teams; Omaha, likewise, has yet to fully deliver on the promise of their surprising 125-114 loss to current #18 Kansas City back in April. While Dallas, Nashville and North Star all fell off this go-around, it seems very possible that any of them could knock off any of the current #23 through #25, making the lower rungs more hotly contested than they've been in a while.
Got opinions? Oh yes you do. Have at it -- courteously and all that -- over on the Power Rankings thread.
