I can’t help but feel sorry for some of the teams I cover this week. I know, it’s homerish, but I am (contrary to some of my e-mail) a human being, after all.

First, there’s the volleyball team, victims of the Enterprise-Record feature curse. Basically, any time an E-R writer decides to write any kind of non-news piece about a player or team, failure is inevitable. Now, admittedly, I don’t believe in curses or jinxes. Or unicorns. But the Wildcats have lost three straight (two since last Friday’s feature ran) and haven’t been the upstart group that last year’s club was. Curious, since basically every player from that team has returned. Is the CCAA really that much better? Well, yeah.

Cal State San Bernardino is No. 1 in the nation, so a loss there really wasn’t a surprise. Sonoma State, which middled around at 13-14 last year, is the biggest early shocker in the conference at 12-1 and 4-0 in CCAA play. And Cal Poly Pomona and UC San Diego are always tough. Chico State is only 1-3 in conference games, and probably more disconcerting, is 0-2 in road games. Both the Sonoma State and Cal Poly Pomona games were winnable contests — the one against the Seawolves even more so as it was at home — so the early losses will definitely hurt. There’s more pressure now for the Wildcats to beat quality teams, and even Humboldt State has joined that discussion. The CCAA is no cakewalk this year, for anybody.

Also, I’m not quite sure how the NCAA does its rankings, but the No. 17 men’s soccer team somehow wins three games, two in its own conference, the other a 7-1 obliteration, and doesn’t move. At all. Strange, but even stranger when you consider that now-No. 5 Cal State L.A. wasn’t ranked at all last week. Apparently a pair of 1-0 conference home victories, including one over then-No. 4 Cal State Dominguez Hills, is enough to jump from unranked to the fifth-best team in Division II.

I’m a believer in the new Chico State team, and I think they've shown early that it’s entirely warranted. It will be another couple weeks before the Golden Eagles and the Wildcats go head-to-head so we can see just how much those pollsters really know. A more rational version of me concedes that they probably have a pretty good idea, but these rankings without explanations attached are just perplexing.