We’ve talked quite a bit this fall about how the early start to the high school football season has made the season go faster than normal. That fact has almost been lost as a few of the winter sports coaches whose school will now probably not make the playoffs. In talking with several of them over the last few days, they’ve suddenly realized that their athletes, as of October 29, may be turning their attention to basketball, wrestling, swimming and rifling.
As we head into the final week of the regular season for District XI teams, it’s time we once again look at this week’s “RCN SportsTalk” football poll for the teams in our coverage area.
First, a quick recap of how we put our polls together and arrive at our conclusions for our bi-weekly results.
We 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.
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.
Now, here are this week’s poll results…
(Note/for the record: one of our voters was “MIA” for this week’s poll).
“ BIG” SCHOOL Football Poll (10 pollsters)
1) Emmaus – 48 (eight – 1st place votes)
2) Parkland – 42 (two – 1st place votes)
3) Freedom — 17
4) Pleasant Valley – 16
5-tied) Nazareth/Whitehall – 13
Other schools receiving more than one vote: Stroudsburg
“Small SCHOOL” Football Poll (8 pollsters)
1) Becahi – 41 (six – 1st place votes)
2) Central Catholic – 35 (three -1st place vote)
3) Saucon Valley – 29
4) Notre Dame – 16
5) Palisades – 10
Other schools receiving more than one vote: Pen Argyl
Coming up on this Thursday’s “SportsTalk” show (7pm LIVE, RCN-TV), we have a jammed-packed show with different sports topics. Keith Groller and I will break down all the various playoff scenarios heading into the final week of the high school football regular season. Georgetown University Head Football Coach Rob Sgarlata will talk about his team’s impressive performance against Fordham last week and give his thoughts on this weekend’s game against Lafayette. Plus, Phillies beat writer Stephen Gross will talk about the World Series and the Phillies off-season agenda. Gross also covers the Phantoms and will talk about the Flyers upcoming season as well as top prospects to keep an eye on.
Email me at rcnsportstalk@rcn.com and tune in for this week’s “SportsTalk” show and podcast for more
