By Derby News Network, Last updated Thu Aug 4 2011 2:23pm

The time, it flies, no? With the WFTDA tournament season coming up next month, it's time to present our second-to-last monthly release of Power Rankings for 2011.

July has traditionally been a fairly slow month for high-level sanctioned WFTDA bouts due to the structure of the calendar (in which bouts played after June aren't taken into consideration for tournament eligibility), and this July was no different. There were only 16 games involving at least one Power Ranked team last month, the fewest since January. In these, our record was 14-2, giving us an accuracy rating of 87% for the month. That brings us to 137 hits and 20 misses on the year for a current accuracy rating of 87% for 2011.

We continue to track how the official WFTDA rankings differ from the Power Rankings, but this month there was only one relevant upset as both sets of rankings missed when the Chicago Outfit (unranked by DNN in July, #9NC by WFTDA) defeated Arch Rival (DNN #24, #8NC by WFTDA).

That makes the overall comparison for the year look like this:

DNN hit, WFTDA miss: 4
WFTDA hit, DNN miss: 1
Both rankings miss: 7

Onward!

Rundown

With many of the big names taking the month off, there's no movement at all in the top ten -- the one game that had the potential to shake things up, #4 Denver vs #6 Bay Area, ended up going just as the rankings would have suggested with a 133-108 win to Denver.

Just below the top ten, we had to take a long look at what to do with #11 Texas, who gave #4 Denver a bit of a scare mid-month in a 135-117 Denver win, but then was defeated two weeks later by #14 Montreal with Texas missing a significant part of their core roster. Raising Texas significantly for the close game against Denver seemed problematic, particularly since they've lost to #7 Philly and #9 Rat City fairly recently; on the other hand, dropping them below Montreal seemed questionable, as we feel a full-strength rematch would go differently. In the end, it became a total wash, leaving Texas standing pat at #11.

Oddly, Montreal put us in an equal bind; we considered raising them for the game against Texas, but their same-day bout against then unranked Houston ended up being a closer and apparently harder win. On the other hand, it was Montreal's second bout in four hours against a fresh Houston team. It all added up to Montreal not moving either, pulled in different directions by seemingly anomalous bout results.

Right below Montreal is the first movement of the month as previous #17 Steel City hops past Minnesota and Naptown to park at #15, following a good 147-117 performance against #10 Windy City. This one was a tough call on whether to make it #14 Steel City and #15 Montreal (Steel City narrowly defeated Montreal in head-to-head action in April) but Montreal's slightly better performance against Windy City in June makes us feel that Montreal would have the edge in a rematch. Happily, that won't remain a hypothetical for too long as Montreal and Steel City are slated to meet in the first round of East Regionals.

The only other movement is due to Houston returning to the chart at #22 after a long absence on the back of a very narrow loss to #21 Boston (102-96) last month. It remains to be seen if their even narrower loss to #14 Montreal (126-121) is an outlier or a sign of big things to come when Houston makes their move at South Central Regionals next month.

On the Bubble

Chicago Outfit. After being bumped out of the top 25 by Nashville in June, the Outfit reached back in to pull down previous #24 Arch Rival -- but the head-to-head loss against Nashville, added to the debut of Houston, keeps the Outfit essentially a phantom #26.

Arch Rival. With ARRG having split their season 1-1 with the Outfit, a rematch would be very hard to call, although the Outfit has the more recent win.

Sacred City. We're still keeping a close eye on SCDG following a decent showing against Montreal and a huge blowout on Providence at ECDX -- Providence has not been a major threat this year, but Sacred's nearly 200-point victory there tracks with the average victory margins of multiple top 25 teams that played Providence earlier this year (Dutchland, Kansas City and Steel City).

Would you like to say things? Super! Robust and courteous discussion is always welcome over on the Power Rankings chart.