Tony Brown

The Northeast has wrapped up its fall season and the teams headed to nationals in the spring are now known.

No real surprises as Army women and Brown University women go as they finished 1 and 2 respectively.

The third team was UMass, Amherst who was clearly the next best team by a long shot.

A quick synopsis of the Northeast reveals that UConn women are improving and given the size of that institution they are a sleeping giant. They did win the National Championship back in 1993 so maybe this has been just a long nap and roll on 2010/11.

Vassar women were decimated by graduation and then injuries so they fell off the map, while Dartmouth, who started the fall late, came on strong.

But here's the real issue, read carefully competitions committee because this reflects on each of you, the Northeast #2 team has an easier route at nationals to the Final 4.

As usual the system of seeding the competition before the teams are known based on last year's results of already flawed seedings makes a mockery of the competition.

Army head coach Will Riddle must have given serious thought to fielding a "B" side in the final of the Northeast Championship. His team had already qualified for nationals and he could look at the brackets and decide if he wanted to play South 1 or Mid-Atlantic 4.

He did the honorable thing and played to win a championship, but I'll bet my bottom dollar that Brown University could well end up in the Final 4 and one hopes that if that's the case then Army had better be there with them!

But then more egg on the competitions committee members’ faces won't look amiss given the track record.

Further afield, the UW-Milwaukee women battled the University of Northern Iowa and emerged with a 15-5 victory and the Midwest Division I Collegiate Women's Championship in Iowa Falls, Iowa.

For their efforts the UW-Milwaukee women are seeded 9th - actually Midwest 1 lost last year and were seeded 10th, but hey, what's in a result. Congratulations to UWM.

Around the country some are seeing the Navy women's result over Penn State women as very significant. The Academy put a licking on PSU and certainly they would seem to be better equipped than last year to get to the Final 4.

By the way, they did get there last year and lost to PSU 33-0. If Army gets through and Navy as Mid-Atlantic 1 gets through that would set up a mouth-watering semifinal between the two military schools.

But I may be getting ahead of myself putting PSU at Mid-Atlantic 2 and in any event this is great bulletin-board stuff for Steinberg and the Nittany Lions!

So if PSU and Stanford run to past form they could meet up in the other semi and then we'd have another humdinger to watch.

Of course there are a lot of scrums, rucks, lineouts, passes, and tackles before we get to that first weekend in May and there will be a host of others making their case.

Can BYU knock-off Army en route, or will Brown University show their mettle and beat Mid-Atlantic 2?

That's why we lace 'em up each weekend and even though there are the usual suspects a sprinkling of possible upsets always keeps it interesting.

Enjoy your turkey and offer up a prayer for the competitions committee.