[OT LAX] NCAA first round: Cornell at Towson

I'm posting this early because I gotta leave for Ithaca tomorrow. Yes, Ithaca -- not Baltimore. Groan.

If there's any way you can get to this game on Saturday night, do it. Unitas (most folks still call it Minnegan) Stadium is an underrated venue, and the atmosphere should be intense.

Here's a scouting report on Towson, prepared with the assistance of an acquaintance who lives a few blocks from the stadium.

Towson is a good team. Although they're very young, particularly on offense, they are NOT the undisciplined, fun-n-gun team that we've come to expect in recent years. In some ways they've started to look like Tony Seaman's Pennsylvania teams from the 1980s: lots of Longs Islanders (Seaman's roots), great faceoff guy, solid defense, relatively low scoring, lots of players with double-figure points -- and if they get a late lead, they go into Seaman's "Penn Zone" (one defender follows and pressures the man with the ball wherever he goes, the rest of the defenders play a rotating five-man zone that looks sort of like a man-down defense).

Most people focus on their two high-profile sophomore attackmen, Jon Engelke and Bobby Griebe -- partly because they are both from families in lacrosse's aristocracy. Jon's father is former Cornell superstar Norm Engelke '81 (I think), and Bobby's father is former Towson great Bob Griebe, a national lacrosse hall of famer and STX muckity-muck. Yet although Engelke and Griebe are the Tigers' leading scorers, they're somewhat one-dimensional. Towson's true catalysts are elsewhere on the roster.

The guys who really make the Tigers tick are brilliant goalie Sothoron (.617 save percentage), LSM Turnblacer, defenseman Cummins, FOGO Eckerl (small but effective), midfielder Bacon, attackman and feeder Mull, and junior short-stick defensive middie Casey Cittadino, who has been described as the best at his position in the nation.

This is a very hard game to get a handle on. My Towson contact predicted a 10-7 Cornell win, but he may have been sandbagging. He told me that Towson played Johns Hopkins tough as nails until the Tigers monster-load of a midfielder Nick Williams (5' 8" & 210 lbs!) got a stupid penalty and Hopkins pulled away on the EMO. (Final score was 8-4 Hopkins.) It was Hopkins' middies who led the way in that game, and that's where Cornell's strength lies.

If you're driving to Towson, I recommend checking out some of Towson's bitchin' diners. There are two pretty famous ones fairly near campus, the Bel-Loc Diner and the Towson Diner. One of them, I think it's the Bel-Loc, has this really cool scalloped, custard-yellow lunch counter.

I'm jealous of anyone who's going. Looking forward to your reports.

Watched a good bit of the Hop-Towson game--played at Towson. For three periods Towson played Hopkins dead-even. Very impressive performance. They made Hopkins play a very deliberate game. Score was 3-3 after three with shots even at 21. Hop goalie credited with 21 saves in total.

[Q]Hillel Hoffmann Wrote:
... monster-load of a midfielder Nick Williams (5' 8" & 210 lbs!) ...[/q]I think the term to use here is "Hornby-esque".

[www.syracuse.com]

So there's no TV coverage, right?

[Q]jtwcornell91 Wrote:

So there's no TV coverage, right?[/q]
As far as I can tell. It's not clear if the Towson radio station is broadcasting the game. There's a "listen" link next to most of their regular-season games--so they may have been webcast, but nothing on the station's schedule about tonight.

The TV game today at 1pm is Hopkins-Marist.

Syracuse-UMass tomorrow, I think.

and here's a link to the rest of the first round analysis: [www.laxpower.com]

The band is going.

I wish I were.

LET'S GO RED!!

Duke crushes Fairfield 23-4 to await the Cornell-Towson winner.

Similarly, Hopkins breezed past Marist 22-6.

Navy in a close one over Delaware, 9-7.

[Q]Tom Pasniewski 98 Wrote:

Duke crushes Fairfield 23-4 to await the Cornell-Towson winner.

Similarly, Hopkins breezed past Marist 22-6.

Navy in a close one over Delaware, 9-7.[/q]
Navy was up 8-2 at one point. Delaware scored two in the last three minutes to make it close. Stats were reasonably even, but I don't think the result was in doubt in the second half.

Let's hope there's at least one first-round "upset."

[Q]Al DeFlorio Wrote:

jtwcornell91 Wrote:

So there's no TV coverage, right?[/Q]
As far as I can tell. It's not clear if the Towson radio station is broadcasting the game. There's a "listen" link next to most of their regular-season games--so they may have been webcast, but nothing on the station's schedule about tonight.

The TV game today at 1pm is Hopkins-Marist.

Syracuse-UMass tomorrow, I think.[/q]

The audio is running [wwwnew.towson.edu]