Fan/coaches/players/whoever poll results

Earlier this week we invited you, dear reader, to vote and predict the final regular season NESCAC standings from top to bottom. We've heard from the prognosticators heading into today's opening games, now it is time to hear from you.

Below are the raw results of the poll. We had more respondents, but SurveyMonkey caps the results off at 100, which while certainly not an unbiased sample, is not small either. The lone missing vote is for Williams, perhaps an Amherst fan that couldn't bare giving a ranking to the hated Ephs?

 There's plenty of variation in the responses, but if we use the average ranking, the predicted order of finish ends up as following:

1. Bowdoin
2. Middlebury
3. Amherst
4. Williams
5. Trinity
6. Wesleyan
7. Colby 
8. Hamilton 
9. Conn College 
10. Tufts

The NESCAC is a hard division to pick and there is plenty of variation throughout the predictions on the interwebs. There has been consensus, however, on the top and bottom of the league, with Bowdoin finishing first and Conn College and Tufts finishing out of the 8 team NESCAC playoff structure in all of the online predictions.

Unhappy with the predictions? Don't worry, the NESCAC season starts tonight and as the old cliche goes "that's why they play the game."  Williams was picked to finish seventh in pre-season predictions last year, before finishing in second and losing the NESCAC championship by one goal. Injuries, the intangible "gelling" of teams and the rise of unexpected stars, like Sean Dougherty for the Ephs last year, can greatly affect a team's finish in the standings. And what's more fun, once we get to the playoffs, not only do predictions not matter, the regular season standings don't matter, either. Get excited, people.