And so we are here at the final 7s club rankings of 2012.

Or do we?

Well here's the dilemma. In our opinion, Old Puget Sound Beach, Belmont Shore, and the Chicago Lions are all virtually tied. OPSB won five of their six games at nationals by huge margins. In fact, four of the top five winning margins at the National Championships were by Beach. The top one, was by Belmont Shore.

But OPSB did lose a game, 14-10 to the Chicago Lions. Obviously a close game, where the margin for winner and loser was razor-thin. So Chicago's better than Beach, right? Well, OK, but Chicago lost to Belmont Shore (in the final), and lost 14-12 to the Tama Laie Lions, a team that won only two games all weekend. So Belmont Shore is better than Chicago, right? Might be, except before Shore beat the Lions, they lost to them in their opening match on Saturday.

So you see how close it could be. We do not think we should automatically rank the winner of the national tournament as #1, if we think over the season, another team has been better. The fun part is, Tiger Rugby (basically Belmont Shore), the Lions, and OPSB will be playing in Glendale this weekend. We might ... might use those results to change the rankings.

After that the rankings pretty much follow the results at nationals. The big questions are: What do you do about OMBAC? They tied Olympic Club, but Olympic Club struggled. What do you do about Olympic Club? They didn't have Colin Hawley due to injury (and got slammed with injuries during the weekend). Once again, we're ranking the season as well as this past weekend, which is a bit of a departure from how we rank 15s teams.

And what do you do about the Tama Laie Lions, who finished 15th, but beat Chicago, who could be the best team in the country?

In the end, we kind of forgive Chicago that loss to the Lions. And the Lions, and KC Blues, don't get dumped down too badly in part because many of their losses were very close. KC lost six games, but five of those were by a try or less (average losing margin, 4 points), so they're not that far off.

You see how this was hard. We think we got it right, but you never know ...