Rankings Round-Up Pre-OUAs

Updated Slanders & Speculation


Slanders & Speculation (as of Oct. 28)
Men & Women
Women 2nd
Men 5th

Sporting Canada Poll (as of Oct. 25)
Women 2nd
Men 3rd

Putdowns & Prognostics #2 (as of Oct. 19)
Men Marauders 6th

TNF Poll (as of Oct. 10)
Women 2nd
Men 8th

Slanders and TNF poll will posted here once they are updated.

The running community seems to have written the Mac Women off as Bridesmaids again this year. But we know better than to just blindly trust rankings. Isn't that why we do races? To see who wins?

The Marauder Men are predicted to finish in a large range of places. this should be expected as the depth in the CIS is outrageous for places 3-7th. Most pollsters seem to generally sidestep the Mac team for a lack of big names (exception being Yorke). Perfect setup for a shock and awe display at OUAs.

Explanation of the rankings:

Slanders & Speculations: Done by two Queen's grads (Jeff Barr and Rob Kitz), who look at nation-wide results and information provided by teams to develop a CIS ranking with a humourous and mildly informative comment about each team. It's the Late night talk show of the cross country rankings world. The duo had plans to run the rankings for 5 years (this being their 3rd), but Kitz has taking to a shine to pickling eggs leaving Barr to pick up the slack, which has meant for a much less frequent updating than in previous years.

Putdowns & Prognostics: This is the attempted new generation of Slanders & Speculation due to the late and infrequent Slanders posts. Where the Slanders boys favour their alma-matter Queens, Putdowns favours Western and Queens, due to highschool ties with Queen's head coach Steve Boyd, and past years on Western's squad.

Sporting Canada Poll: This is a poll of all of the CIS coaches in regards to rankings. No wasted words, just straight numbers. This provides what should be expected to be the fairest and most correct rankings due to the equal number of votes for coaches at each university. However a small bias is expected toward Ontario schools, as we have more universities in Ontario and compete against each other regularly so coaches in Ontario are more likely to pick a team that they see regularly versus other non-Ontario schools.

TNF Poll: Similar to the Sporting Canada Poll, this polls draws from Tnf contributors that include CIS coaches as well as club coaches and former athletes. Out of the 6 pollsters, 3 are from Ontario (London, Guelph, Toronto), and they rate 10 teams on a scale from 1-10, 10 being a first place position, and 1 being an expected 10th place position.