Basketball Power Poll - Week 3
Hayfield's Brandon Winbush is sitting pretty at the top spot in the Power Poll after two wins over top top-five teams.
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It's official. The switch has now been flipped and we're into basketball mode. With that comes the ranking of the ten best public school teams in Northern Virginia, otherwise known as the Power Poll.
Thing is, who goes where? Who's our top team? Who fills out the other spots at the bottom of the Poll? With so many teams sitting with just one loss and others with several losses to top private schools, the Power Poll picture gets a whole lot cloudier.
Yet before we go through the rankings, we'll try to explain a bit of our methods.
For starters, this is different than the football Power Poll. Teams will not be ranked based on they handle their schedule inside their respective classification. In other words, we're throwing each team's classification out the window. Without any power points in basketball, a lot more AAA teams schedule down a classification, and that alone eliminates any guesswork over wondering how a AA team would fare against the state's top competition.
Also, in the sport of basketball, school size doesn't matter a whole lot. For example, three of the top five teams in our Power Poll are Division 5 schools and that's a grouping that's had plenty of success recently as seen in Wakefield, South Lakes, Marshall, Potomac and Hayfield's success at various points this decade. Lastly, a lot of AA's biggest schools are only separated by a little more than 100 students from that of the AAA programs, which is miniscule when considering how the aforementioned Division 5 schools have more than held their own against schools Division 6 that have upwards of 1,000 more students.
What's also unique in basketball is the private school factor. For football, seeing a team from around here line up against a private school in DC or Maryland--let alone Virginia--is a rarity. Yet in basketball, we see it all the time. Most of the time too, we see a lot of schools load up on the privates to toughen their schedule. With teams purposefully stacking their schedule against programs with recruited players, we're forced to treat a loss to them a bit differently. We'll treat a close loss to a school such as Montrose Christian, Paul VI or Bishop O'Connell better than we would a team that just won a game against an opponent that's considered to be average.
Of course, if a team gets slaughtered by a private school power, that will obviously be viewed negatively, but the main point is we're going to keep things in perspective if one of our local teams plays a DC area private school power to the wire.
Alright, enough rambling, we're sure you get the picture. After three weeks of basketball, here's the first unveiling of the basketball Power Poll:
