It's time to start thinking about how the regional order of things shakes out!
The billing on this poll should include a set of quotation marks around preseason because Utah is already a couple of weekends into their season. And, results from those two weekends no doubt influenced some of the votes from our panel.
As always preseason rankings are about 40% knowledge, 30% reputation, and 30% guesswork. There is plenty of room for adjustment in these rankings as the season moves along. But, so that you can see what our panel of experts came up with, here are the preseason rankings for the Southwest region:
It is, however, no longer enough to rank merely the large-school programs. With this installment of rankings, we also start ranking small-school (enrollment under 1000 students) programs as well. At least for this time, these are strictly my own rankings. We do not yet have a small-school rankings panel. If you are a coach would care to join me in the small-school rankings panel, please send me an e-mail at the address shown at the bottom of this page.
Until we have a panel, I will refrain from ranking my own team, The Classical Academy, in the small-school rankings. I believe that team would likely earn a place in both small-school boys and small-school girls rankings, but it smells of personal bias if I put them there without making myself part of a greater body of ranking experts.
And, even more so than with the large schools, these rankings represent some guesswork. The level of publicity is smaller and the number of unknown factors is greater for small schools than it is for large schools. I'm in the process of trying to change that, but it is nonetheless true. Nevertheless, here is my best guess at how the region's small schools shake out. These rankings will be updated every other week, just as the all-school rankings are.
