Without question, it’s been one of the wildest high school football seasons in recent memory, and our poll experts have had a heck of a time trying to give us perspective on which have been the top teams each week. Heck, we pretty much went the last two years with Parkland being the definitive top team in the Lehigh Valley region.
Undaunted, we’ll proceed in unveiling this week’s listing of the best teams in the RCN coverage area for District XI.
But first, a quick recap of how we put our polls together and arrive at our conclusions for our bi-weekly results.
Unlike polls that consist of a couple representatives within the same organization, our poll is much more varied with input from many different people over a wider scope. Our voting panel consists of local media members from different outlets, along with local coaches and athletic directors from across the entire district. The voters are not identified (unless they appear on our “SportsTalk” TV show and podcast and chose to reveal themselves) so they can give their honest impressions without any worry of outside pressures or “bulletin board” material, and we rotate different pollsters from different schools each year, including guests from our biggest to our smallest schools.
Despite this fall’s change in the PIAA classification, our poll remains with the standard, tried-and-true format that we have utilized for many seasons. We will take the 400-male enrollment number as the cutoff for schools within the District XI/RCN footprint. All schools above that number qualify as “big schools” in our poll. These schools consist of Parkland, Liberty, Allen, Easton, Emmaus, Liberty, Dieruff, Freedom, Stroudsburg, Pleasant Valley, Northampton, Nazareth, East Stroudsburg-South, Whitehall, Southern Lehigh and Bangor.
“Small schools” (below 400-male enrollment) consist of Saucon Valley, Central Catholic, Bethlehem Catholic, Northwestern, Wilson, Palisades, Palmerton, Salisbury, Notre Dame, Pen Argyl, Northern Lehigh and Catasauqua. Each pollster will identify their top five teams in each group—the top school gets five points, the second team gets four points and so on, with an average score determining the order of teams in the poll.
Now, here are this week’s poll results…
“ BIG” SCHOOL FB Poll (10 pollsters)
1. Emmaus – 50 total points (ten – 1st place votes
2. Parkland – 40
3. Whitehall – 19
4. Liberty – 16
5. Freedom – 14
Note: Pleasant Valley and Stroudsburg also received at least one vote.
“Small SCHOOL” FB Poll (9 pollsters)
1. Becahi – 44 total points (eight – 1st place votes)
2. Central Catholic – 34 (one -1st place vote)
3. Notre Dame – 26
4-tie Northwestern – 15
Saucon Valley — 15
Other schools receiving at least one vote: Pen Argyl
Disagree with someone’s placement? Should one team be ranked higher than another? Feel free to email us at rcnsportstalk@rcn.com or call us during our live show this Thursday to voice your opinion and talk football with us. Joining Keith Groller and me will be Philadelphia Eagles Beat Writer Nick Fierro to preview the Birds game against Detroit this weekend (Nick also has some interesting thoughts on HS football as well). We’ll also have Bill Ladson (mlb.com writer) on this week’s show to talk about the MLB playoff races.
