The selection process for the NCAA men’s lacrosse tournament every May is broken.
And, Army undeservingly paid the price.
For the second year in a row, Army, the team which finished this season with a 12-2 record, won the Patriot League regular-season title, was not announced as part of the 18-team field that will determine the national lacrosse champion. This comes despite the fact that Army was ranked fourth in the nation in both national polls as recently as last week, led the nation in scoring defense with about 7 goals a game, had standout players all over the field and had a 5-0 out-of-conference record, including a big win over eight-seeded North Carolina.
Army lost to Colgate, 16-13 in the Patriot League semifinals Friday. The Raiders beat Boston University Sunday to claim the league’s automatic bid into the tournament.
On Sunday evening, Army was not one of the eight teams that received at-large bids. Last year, the Black Knights also won the Patriot League title, finished with a 12-3 record and also lost in the semifinals of the league’s tournament. No bid was given to the Black Knights.
There are two factors that play hard against Army and, for that matter, any team in the Patriot League that is hoping for an at-large bid into the tournament. One is the fact that the tournament committee uses a barometer, the Rating Percentage Index, that heavily favor teams from the three blue chip lacrosse conferences. The RPI is a system that is used to rank teams based on winning percentage, strength of schedule and the strength of their opponent’s schedule.
This year, for example, the Ivy League has two top teams, top-seeded Cornell and third-seeded Princeton, in the tournament. The fact that the other five Ivy League schools played Cornell and Princeton, and, by the way, lost to them, boasts their RPI and strength of schedule rating. This year, Harvard, which finished 10-4 with only a top 10 win over Syracuse and no top 20 wins, had a better RPI and strength of schedule simply because they played—and lost—to Cornell and Princeton—than Army and received a bid into the tournament.
Army, which plays in a 9-team conference, finished 7-1 in the regular season in league play. But the Patriot League’s second and third best teams, Colgate and Boston University, are only ranked in the mid-teens or low 20s in RPI and some league squads, notably Holy Cross, Bucknell and Loyola, were not in the top 40 in RPI ranking.
So, despite the fact that Army beat the league’s three worst teams handily, the Black Knights may have actually lost points in the RPI system simply by just playing the games.
The other factor hurting Army is the NCAA’s decision to limit the number of teams in the tournament to 18 and allowing four conferences, including three low-ranked leagues, to get an automatic qualifier into the NCAA with only six teams in their league. The NCAA rule-of-thumb is to take 20 percent of the eligible teams for the postseason and there are only 78 teams who play Div. 1 men’s lacrosse.
This year, for example, Air Force, which finished with an 8-7 record but won the six-team Atlantic Sun Conference postseason tournament, is in the NCAA tournament despite defeating just one team with a winning record all season.
Assuming the NCAA will not budge on the number of teams in the playoff, the tournament committee must come up with some other formula that seems to only look at who a team plays, rather than also considering whether they won or lost the game.
And, the NCAA must consider raising the number of teams in a conference to qualify for an automatic berth to encourage some type of consolidation in leagues, which will open more at-large berths.
Army coach Joe Alberici has long said that the first goal for any Army lacrosse season is getting into the league’s postseason tournament and winning it to guarantee a spot in the NCAA tournament. Otherwise, he says, it is doubtful that Army will get an at-large bid into the NCAA tournament.
This season, Army, arguably one of the top six to 10 teams in the nation, will sit at home while a number of less-successful teams will get to compete for the national championship. And, that is just not right.
