I think it’s coming, just a matter of time and it will be awesome for the sport. T9 is the biggest hurdle.
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NCAA MLAX Selection Committee
- Thread starter Caliknight
- Start date
It is growing West and actually South.as well. Summer club tournament games had some great girls teams from Florida. A bunch of boys from our HS went to University of Tampa on scholarships. A few years back went to a Rutgers- Michigan game at Yurack field. Michigan at the time was a good Club team. Michigan is Midwest but last I checked, west of here.
Stanford has had a good club team for over 40 years. Played on an old USCLA club with a couple of grads back then. But Title 9 was the PAC-10 (back then) problem, and still is.
If Utah can convince Colorado (which I am surprised has not added MLAX already) they can pull in Denver and AF and would just need two other PAC schools for an AQ. If that happens I would expect other PAC schools to jump in quickly. I bet we’ll see a more B1G schools jump in within the next 5 years. My money is on MSU and Northwestern.
And the money part is what concerns me the most. With the final four attendance dropping how do you get more people to attend put in schools with history and alumni. So they look to put in more bluebloods. I wonder if the attendance issue comes up I the committee room. Is that why Hopkins got in the other year over us when we beat them twice? More of a draw and tv audience?
So, move the goal post today because the field might get longer in the future? When the number of programs grow, we'll see an expanded field. I'd love to see more games in the tournament, but for that to be warranted, I I think we'd need more programs.
It's also the same thing Big Ten does in lacrosse. Every ACC tournament participant is top-15 RPI, so is every Big Ten tournament team. It's no coincidence that U-M, OSU, PSU, and RU have all been consistently nationally ranked (well, every school but U-M) since the B1G started sponsoring lacrosse. Truth be told, B1G teams aren't at a competitive disadvantage in any way vis-a-vis ACC teams or any other teams in the country. Lax is expensive and if it's one thing Big Ten schools have, it's money.
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As much as I like conspiracy theories, what has kept us out the last two years have been our wtf losses. We’ve had a couple each year including this year. As much as I Think the ACC is totally over-rated, to their credit they rarely lose to mid level or worse teams. Other than UNC which is bad this year and setting aside margin of victory, their worst loses are Cuse to Navy, ND to Michigan or Duke to Penn, none of which are really bad losses.
It already is tight due to the AQs given. I don't think It is fair to pull from those weaker conferences already given and if you want to accommodate the growth and interest you open the field. It's called planning. It's a great game but it has benefited recently from the strong demise of Football and baseball. A relatively regional sport will eventually be national.
Think about it. You have a team that in some polls is ranked in top ten but is on bubble. Their own website argued the use of RPI is justified but have had cases of a top 5 poll team not getting into the tournament. The RPI is FUBAR and their idiocy in adherence to it is ridiculous. Opening the field will help address their complete and utter stupidity.
Didn't mean it as a conspiracy theory, just wondering if it comes up in deciding equal teams. I agree with you as to why we have been left out.
When talking about the Acc who outside of the Acc have they beaten of quality.
The problem isn’t with RPI specifically and they don’t choose to use it because they are idiots. The actual purpose is to remove as much subjectivity as possible and to reward teams that schedule up, which are both good objectives. The problem is that they do not factor in margin of victory, which all things being equal, is probably the single best indicator to relative strength because it provides many more data points for comparison. The problem is that they really can’t use MoV for two very specific reasons. First, because once it becomes a factor it is too easy to manipulate either to game the system or for gambling purposes. Second, because it would provide incentive for strong teams to run up the score on weak teams, which is not good for the sport at the collegiate level.
The current system is completely flawed, but short of relying completely subjective criteria, i.e. polls, there really isn’t a better alternative without taking into account MoV. RPI can be manipulated but really only by scheduling. And you have to schedule a few years out so there is no guarantee that the team on your schedule is good the year you play them. And it does tend to favor the Moe established conferences but that is also because they tend to lose to poor teams less frequently.
The current system is completely flawed, but short of relying completely subjective criteria, i.e. polls, there really isn’t a better alternative without taking into account MoV. RPI can be manipulated but really only by scheduling. And you have to schedule a few years out so there is no guarantee that the team on your schedule is good the year you play them. And it does tend to favor the Moe established conferences but that is also because they tend to lose to poor teams less frequently.
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This has been a strange year, particularly in the ACC. They have lost a lot of OOC games to good teams and have been extremely non-competitive at times but haven’t really lost to very many mediocre or worse teams. Usually when a team gets whipped by good teams they eventually get caught by lesser teams but for the most par that hasn’t happened to the ACC. And remember, MoV is not a factor that is able to be taken into consideration for RPI and rankings. If it were, you can bet the ACC would be ranked much lower.
When has a team ranked in the top-5 in the RPI (or coaches/media polls) at this point in the season missed the NCAA tournament? I know this is all very situational, but that seems mathematically impossible, even if that team is ranked #5 and even if somehow teams ranked #1-4 didn't win their conferences.
If you're talking specifically about Rutgers, it's a lot easier for the program to avoid losses to Army and Princeton in the future than it is to change the way the NCAA does anything. It's also easier to schedule and beat more top-20 teams than it is to get the NCAA to stray away from using something objective (albeit arguably inappropriate given the short season in lax).
I don't think anyone wants a system that relies soley on the whims of a handful of people.
Yes you would think that but since the good old boys run this still and their adherence to this insanity tells me it must be rigged in some way to protect them. When it doesn't, it will be thrown out in a blink of an eye.
It's not about Rutgers....
Regarding a No.5 poll team not making tournament -
See no. 2 on page 4 from NCAA/ US lacrosse
http://www.laxbytes.com/binmenstats13/guide.pdf
problems with the RPI:
www.laxpower.com/common/MD1_Selection_Process.php
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Not the same, everyone has a basketball team and many are pretty bad. There are a lot of good lacrosse teams being left out. When you have undefeated teams and nationally ranked No.5 teams left out of tournament, but yet you let in a 6-6 team, something is wrong.
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I don't think the committee thinks in those terms. More like I have an affinity for X school or I am buds with Y coach or Z's AD sits on this board so I am not going to ding them.
They didn't name any teams. I can see how undefeated is possible for a team playing a weak schedule, but I can not remember a team ranked #5 at the end of the season in the 16 team era not make the tourney
From the second link:
Problem # 3 – Failure to Consider the Lack of Crossover Games Between Regions
The committee's second and third criteria base strength of schedule solely upon the winning percentages of opponents and opponents once-removed, respectively. Consequently, these criteria miss the fact that some comparatively weak groups of teams play the vast majority of their games only against each other. The best team in a weak group may have a spotless record and may have beaten teams with good records but still wouldn't compete against teams from other groups. Yet the RPI won't account for the weak nature of the group in which such a team plays.
Consider, for example, two regions of teams: the north and south. Assume that one region, e.g., the north, fields much stronger teams than the south. Take as a given that, in the current collegiate lacrosse landscape, the majority of teams most frequently play opponents located within their region (for example, teams on the Atlantic coast play each other more often than teams in the West). Under the committee's current system, a win between two weak southern teams counts as much as a win between two strong northern teams. The RPI will consequently rank southern teams closer to the equal of northern teams than they deserve, simply because southern teams play each other much more frequently than northern teams. Because there are few crossover games between regions (groups), the committee's winning percentage-focused model is ineffective.
That sounds an awful lot like the ACC vs B1G.....
No. 1 still is my biggest issue. If we were to apply this RPI model to football and Big Ten we could lose to Michigan OSU Wisconsin etc all by 50 points and beat a few cupcakes and we would have a high RPI ranking based on who we played. No factoring in of how bad you lost.
It's stupid because of the low number of contests. It works in hoops because they play 2x more games. In lacrosse, the sample size is too small.
