Acrosse the Lacrosse Polls: February 20, 2012

UPDATED: February 22, 2012, with College Crosse poll.

These pieces are usually more substantial, but as everyone is still kind of idling in the driveway, it's really hard to make internal combustion when you're just holding a can of gasoline and a bucket of screws. So, you get what you get at this point.

The media and coaches polls are out, and with some potential overreaction in both, Virginia holds down the top spot in both tallies. Both Duke and Denver took nasty spills with their losses over the weekend, which means all of nothing in late-February as only 10 percent of the season is in the books. Massachusetts and Notre Dame are your upwardly mobile squads with their big wins since the last poll releases (the Minutemen knocking off Army and Bucknell and the Buckeyes scooting past Denver).

14 teams still have yet to play a regular season game at this point, so there is little reason to pop a spring in your brain, knock over a liquor store in a rage-induced coma, and sit in the clink all because you think it's unfair that Denver slid a half-dozen spots because of a close loss on a neutral field. Of course, if you want to do that, I'm all for getting your name in the newspaper.

Below is an aggregation of the top ten in both the coaches and media polls. The full polls can be seen on the left-hand column of this Internet computing page. I'm holding off on computer-type rankings until we get a little deeper into the season. The College Crosse poll -- when aggregated -- will appear after the jump.

Some thoughts:

• Notre Dame probably isn't the second-best team in the country, even if the coaches poll says so; Denver probably is one of the ten-best teams in the country. But, polls are polls and polls are going to poll. With an upcoming schedule of Robert Morris, Michigan, and Hartford, the Pioneers should get themselves back into the top portion of the polls relatively quickly.
• Polls at the early start of the season tend to love the transitive property; polls at mid- and late-season tend to disregard the transitive property. This is why I often prefer the computer models which try to actually measure performance rather than simple wins and losses. Whatever, that's a diatribe for another day.
• Every ACC team is in the top ten. It'll be interesting to see what the polls start to look like when these knuckleheads start hammering each other.

What do you guys think about this? Okay or no-kay? The comments, they are yours.

Here's the aggregation from the College Crosse crew:

Also receiving votes: Colgate (2); Bucknell (1)