When I looked at the CIS men’s basketball rankings last week, I noticed Concordia just poked their way into tenth place on the list with 34 points.
There are several problems with this. First of all, that Concordia made their first appearance on the list only last week when they were coming off of a National Championship game appearance last year, while losing only one player, all-Canadian Phil Langlois, from their team. To start this season off, they might not have been a top-5 team, but at least somewhere in the bottom half of the top-10.
The second problem is that the only Quebec team that was on the top-10 list until last week was the Laval Rouge et Or, who started the season ranked number one in the country only to be cemented in third place in the Quebec Conference this season. They were eighth this past week.
In the new rankings released on Tuesday, Concordia moved their way up to seventh, but Laval was still listed, this time in ninth, and the Bishop’s Gaiters, in second place and who defeated Laval for the third time this season was not listed at all.
I feel that these rankings are subjective, and should be taken with a grain of salt but it shouldn’t be that way. Yes, the CIS rankings do a fairly good job of ranking the top teams, but the bottom half is usually a crapshoot and it is incomprehensible to me why it took Concordia so long to get ranked. If not Concordia, then at least Bishop’s who was leading the Quebec University Basketball League for most of the first half of the season. The rankings are set up to allow teams who are above or below the expectations that were made before the season started to move up or down. So yes, Bishop’s was a surprise to most peopl, but they are playing some of the best basketball in Canada this season. The rankings should be based on performance on the court not how the team looks on paper. Each week there’s a new poll, and the previous week does not factor into the scoring for the current week. So, we’ve discovered the system works fine. That could only mean the voters are not doing their job. I know that most of them are coaches in the league or working members of the media, and by no means am I taking away from what they do, but maybe the answer is to allow the student press to vote as well. The NCAA has a coaches’ poll and a media poll, so perhaps the CIS can have a coaches’ poll and a student media poll. This has come up in conversations with sports editors at other university newspapers and it’s something that we feel would be a very welcome addition. You can have the main writer for each team do a little bit of research and conduct a top-10. The kicker, so people don’t take advantage by voting for their own team, is that each voter’s selections would be published as well as a reason for the pick. I think this is a good way for the student press to be recognized and a good way to see which teams people around the country are picking based on games they see and the research they do. Once again let me reiterate that I am not knocking the job the current voters do. I just feel that the more cross-country polls that are conducted, whether official or unofficial, the more accurate the results will be. It could turn the CIS top-10 from a cosmetic item into something that actually can be used as a measure of the top teams in the country. Also, I feel that the sports with many teams should have more teams ranked; basketball and men’s hockey should have 15 or 20 teams in the rankings, while sports with fewer teams, like football, should keep it at 10. If the CIS considered these different options, the possibilities would be endless, as would be the debates. But at least the rankings would more accurately reflect the teams, and that’s a benefit that’s beyond debate.
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