Another two weeks have passed and while the Top Four teams took care of business there was a lot of teams in the 5-25 who took losses. With the NAIA moving the National Tournament field from 60 teams down to 48 we have seen us enter crunch time in the NAIA!
We still don’t have all of the details for the National Tournament. We know that their will be pods of 3 teams each, with the top ranked team in each pod getting a Bye. What we don’t know is if they will set those Pods as “regionals” or by the ARC’s that they were supposedly going to have rankings for before the pandemic changed the landscape of the season. We also don’t know yet if we will see a reseeding once the winners each make it to Kansas City. Lastly, we don’t know how the automatic bids will align. How many will be given out, if the leagues who have a lot of teams opting out of the season will get same amount of bids. Plenty of other things will need to be ironed out before we get to conference tournaments.
For our 4th rankings, we opted to move Georgetown back into the Top 10. We didn’t know what to do with them last rankings with them coming off of back to back losses and one of them by 40 points. We can admit when we are wrong and we were. Coach Briggs has his troops playing some big time defense right now. They look like an entire new team and one that is primed to make a big run!
Morningside moves back into the Top 10 this week. They are a team that had a couple of blips early in season, but have been playing some great basketball as of late.
Holy Cross makes it’s first appearance of the season inside of our Top 25. They are currently 8-2 overall with their only two losses to #6 Faulkner by four and # 18 Bethel (Ind.) by seven in OT. That Bethel game was also HCC’s first game of the season.
While the window is getting smaller, there is still some time for some movement before the end of the season. Hopefully by the next set of rankings we will have more answers on how the National Tournament will be structured! Until then we continue to look forward to watching games and trying to bring you the best coverage we can!
| 1 | Indiana Wesleyan | 21-1 |
| 2 | LSU Shreveport (La.) | 11-0 |
| 3 | William Penn (Iowa) | 15-1 |
| 4 | Lewis-Clark State (Idaho) | 12-1 |
| 5 | Arizona Christian | 16-2 |
| 6 | Faulkner | 15-1 |
| 7 | Shawnee State (Ky.) | 16-2 |
| 8 | Providence (Mont.) | 6-0 |
| 9 | Georgetown (Ky.) | 10-3 |
| 10 | Morningside (Iowa) | 17-2 |
| 11 | Science & Arts (Ok.) | 9-1 |
| 12 | Talladega (Ala.) | 15-2 |
| 13 | Loyola (La.) | 9-2 |
| 14 | The Master’s (Calif.) | 9-1 |
| 15 | SAGU (Texas) | 4-1 |
| 16 | Xavier (La.) | 7-1 |
| 17 | Stillman (Ala.) | 7-1 |
| 18 | Bethel (Ind.) | 18-3 |
| 19 | Mid-America Christian (Okla.) | 4-2 |
| 20 | Texas A&M – Texarkana | 5-0 |
| 21 | Dakota Wesleyan (S.D.) | 14-4 |
| 22 | Marian (Ind.) | 9-4 |
| 23 | Holy Cross (Ind.) | 8-2 |
| 24 | Cumberlands (Ky.) | 14-5 |
| 25 | Bethel (Kan.) | 14-4 |
