Lax Swami's anti-Big Red bias continues

[ugarte]

[quote DeltaOne81]For the record, I don't know or care whether its bias or just stupid. My point is only that it flies in the face of this season thus far.[/quote]
Well, you should care a little. Obviously anti-Cornellism isn't a particularly insidious form of bias but claiming that someone is biased is a pretty fraught accusation; the difference between bias and stupidity is an important one - even if it this claim of bias will have zero repurcussions. As for whether the rankings are valid in light of "the season thus far," we'll have to agree to disagree about whether "the season thus far" is the proper parameter of evidence for a dude's rankings on his own website. If you are going to complain about anything on the Swami's website, start with the stupid intro and the earsplitting douche-rock that blares when you fire up the page.

Princeton's losses, *at the time* may have been against the top 2 teams, but the Blue Jays have since proven to be less than the top team that everyone though they'd be. Sans that, they only have a 1 goal loss to UVa. If the weight of that alone is enough to get you #2, then Drexel should be #-1.

You don't think I disagree with this, do you? JHU's loss dropped Hopkins to 10, dropped Albany to 7 (I think?) and moved Princeton up a slot? Yeah, nonsensical. But still somewhere short of "indefensible."

And last year's Hurricanes won the Stanley Cup < cough, choke, gag >.

As the what seed? I'm not sure this is an example with a lot of heft to it. Sure, teams can vary wildly from year to year but all of the prognosticators picking Florida to repeat were basing their evaluation much more on the win over UCLA in last year's final than on the loss to Vanderbilt (among others) this year.

Btw, the only reason this bugs me is not because I expect us to go undefeated - if I did, I'd just sit back and let him keep being wrong. I still figure we'll lose a game or two this year. Maybe Princeton, or Cuse at the dome, or Hobart, or a 'bad' loss somewhere in Ivy play. And if we don't get credit for playing very very well thusfar, when are we going to get credit for it? Oh yeah, maybe next year he can let our play thusfar this year boost our ranking :-P

If you think we should be ranked higher it is because you think we should go undefeated (even though we probably won't). I think that is a reasonable response to the available information. If one expects us to lose - and one can conclude that Swami expects us to lose - I think he's got us ranked where we should be. BFD if we don't get credit from Swami right now!

Of course, if we lose to Princeton and he drops us to #7 I'm going to leave a flaming bag of poo on his doorstep.

[DeltaOne81]

For a comedian, you're sure taking me very seriously :-P

If you think we should be ranked higher it is because you think we should go undefeated (even though we probably won't). I think that is a reasonable response to the available information. If one expects us to lose - and one can conclude that Swami expects us to lose - I think he's got us ranked where we should be. BFD if we don't get credit from Swami right now!

I actually don't think we should be ranked higher. I'm perfectly fine with 2-3. I just think Princeton should be ranked lower. I haven't yet complained about UVa being ahead of us and I won't until they lose at least one more, if we're still undefeated. I find it somewhat insulting that he's putting a team ahead of us on the strength of loses, while at the same time discrediting our major win.

Of course, if we lose to Princeton and he drops us to #7 I'm going to leave a flaming bag of poo on his doorstep.

That's basically all I'm saying - I guess I'm a couple weeks ahead of you on the poo-dropping wishes.

That and that while watching the Cuse/Princeton game tomorrow, I'm pretty sure I'm going to find myself pulling for the Orange (so long as we didn't have a letdown against Sucks), even though I'd usually go Ivy.

[ugarte]

[quote DeltaOne81]For a comedian, you're sure taking me very seriously :-P[/quote]
In reply to http://elf.elynah.com/read.php?7,113889,114282#msg-114282

[quote DeltaOne81]For a comedian, you're sure taking me very seriously :-P[/quote]
Am I not human? If you provoke me, do I not respond? If you engage me, do I not think? If you fail to pay your rent do I and my lansmaner throw you and your family out onto the stoop? (I may have gotten off track here.)

[Jeff Hopkins '82]

[quote ugarte][quote DeltaOne81]For a comedian, you're sure taking me very seriously :-P[/quote]
Am I not human? If you provoke me, do I not respond? If you engage me, do I not think? If you fail to pay your rent do I and my lansmaner throw you and your family out onto the stoop? (I may have gotten off track here.)[/quote]

OK, that was funny. :-P

[KeithK]

I can't think of a single instance in sport where last season's result impact your ranking or seeding this year.

I can think of many, many instances where a team's standing is based to a significant extent on that team's recent or long term history.  For example, first half polls in every college sport that I can think of. While this can be annoying when it leaves your team out in the cold it's not entirely unreasonable.  While I agree that actual standings and seedings aren't history based (any more) and shouldn't be, Lax Swami's rankings are essentially a poll where they only ask one guy.  So the standards for polls should apply.

[JasonN95]

You might want steer clear of the Swami this week. He has Cornell at #3, but you'd never guess it from what he has to say. Oh, Swami, why do you torment us so? :-P

[billhoward]

[quote JasonN95]You might want steer clear of the Swami this week. He has Cornell at #3, but you'd never guess it from what he has to say. Oh, Swami, why do you torment us so? :-P[/quote]

[quote LaxSwami (once you scroll past reams of Army-Navy material)]  Cornell (#3) at Dartmouth (unranked)--(Saturday, April 14, 1:00 PM, Hanover, NH)--When Duke attacker Matt Danowski blew a shot off the pipe in the waning seconds of the Blue Devils' game with Cornell earlier this season, who knew that would form the main reason for ranking the Big Red as the single best team in Division I? But what else can it be? Cornell has only played one Top Ten team, and will probably play only one other for the remainder of the season. Yes, things may be a little convoluted at the top these days, what with one team beating another, but the Swami does not generally subscribe to the notion that a one goal victory over a sole (presently #4) Top Ten opponent is reason enough, by itself, to enshrine any team as #1. The two best defenses that Cornell has seen this year have been Duke and Army, both of which held the Big Red to seven goals. The Swami thinks Dartmouth does not have the defensive capability of accomplishing this and likes Cornell to win.[/quote]

... Nit: The Swami is counting opponent rankings where they stand now. I believe when we played them, Duke was at 5, Notre Dame was at 8, Army at 9, if Cornell's press notes are accurate. Swami thinks Princeton is the best team because it has lost to two top ten teams. (By a goal each.)

[ugarte]

[quote JasonN95]You might want steer clear of the Swami this week. He has Cornell at #3, but you'd never guess it from what he has to say. Oh, Swami, why do you torment us so? :-P[/quote]
And makes Cornell his 8 point game because he is determined to finish in last place.

His logic is no different this week than last week. He thinks Cornell is overrated because the teams that they beat, who were believed to be top-10 caliber at the time of the game, aren't as good as people thought. Ergo, Cornell's wins over them aren't as impressive as we'd like to believe. It is uncharitable - losing to us is part of why he thinks that - but so be it. He hasn't been right about anything else this year, so it is encouraging that he thinks we are overrated.

[billhoward]

From the Baltimore Sun. What northern team is missing ... ?

>>> It's different at Albany, and a lot of times coaches from up north don't get enough credit. It's much easier to recruit players to the South on campuses at Virginia, Duke and North Carolina than it is places like Albany, Massachusetts and even Syracuse. A lot of northern teams seldom get outside to practice until midway in the season, putting them at a big disadvantage.

... Syracuse? Winter? Outdoor practice disadvantage?


... to be fair, this is a southern paper saying the coach of the year is not Duke's John Danowski but Albany's Scott Farr.

[Chris '03]

I came across this a while ago but I don't think it's been posted here:
Caught in His Web - a Feature on The Swami

[billhoward]

This piece was by a Princeton assistant sports information director, Jerry Price, same guy who did this awesome piece on Doug Moe a couple years back. This is so unfair - if PR guys all wrote this well, there'd be no work at all for journalists, other than creating blogs that don't pay much anyhow.


>>> Andy Moe, Where Did You Go?

After scoring the game-winning goal in the 1992 NCAA championship game, Andy Moe disappeared for 14 years. Suddenly, he's back.

Relax. He's not dead. Turns out that was just a rumor. So was the one about how he was living in the Himalayas. Ever hear that one?

Nope. After all that, he's in New York City of all places. Fourteen years without a sound, and he just turns up one night at an alumni function 50 miles from the Princeton campus.

"I walked in," says Princeton men's lacrosse coach Bill Tierney, "and it was like a spotlight was on him. It was a very small, very crowded room, and he was the first person I saw. I turned to Metzy [associate head coach David Metzbower] and said 'look, Andy Moe is here.'"

Andy Moe, who scored the biggest goal in Princeton University history and then quite literally vanished, stepped out of his nomadic 14-year walkabout and was there, just like that.

"I guess I dropped out of the loop," Moe says simply.

* * *

Legend has it that when the men's lacrosse team returned to the Princeton campus after winning the 1992 NCAA championship in Philadelphia, Andy Moe went to the bridge on Washington Road and threw all of his lacrosse equipment into Lake Carnegie. Hours earlier, it was Moe who scored a goal 10 seconds into the second overtime to give Princeton a 9-8 win over Syracuse, and legend suggests that throwing the equipment into the water was his statement that he could never top that moment in the game, so why bother trying?

"I have no comment about that," Moe says now with a laugh.

If the legend is true, then gone was his equipment. Days later, Moe was gone too.

And no one knew where. Not his coaches. Not his teammates. Not Mike Kinney, a reporter from the Star-Ledger who set out a few years ago to write a "where-are-they-now" story on Moe and never figured out the answer to that simplest of questions.

In this age of being able to find almost anyone through Google or on an expanded e-mail list or through some other database, Andy Moe spent 14 anonymous years living and working in the North, the South, and the West.

"I felt a certain degree of wanting to strike out on my own and explore worlds that I had not inhabited before," Moe says.

Moe began his post-college life in Colorado writing a novel that he abandoned when "I realized that my desire to write greatly outweighed my capacity for saying anything meaningful at the time."

After a year, Moe traveled with his girlfriend at the time to Alabama, where he worked as a feature writer for the Montgomery Advertiser. From there it was on to Boston, where he worked as a furniture maker before attending the Massachusetts College of Art to study sculpture for two years.

Next was a return to Colorado as a sculptor. While there, to supplement his income, Moe began to teach Argentine tango for the first time.

"I found that I loved to teach, and I got more and more into that," Moe says. "I was invited to teach in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and from there, I got invited to teach at Triangulo, the only tango studio in New York City. I was there for another year, and then I met someone who would become a spiritual advisor for me, and I devoted myself to my own spiritual development. Then, about two years ago, I started writing screenplays and began to make my own furniture."

Today he has his own furniture design business, Moe Design Studio, located in Manhattan, and his web site of www.studiomoe.com. His specialty is making custom furniture from reclaimed lumber.

"I just finished making a table," Moe says. "I acquired some red oak beams that had help up a tobacco warehouse in Tennessee, and I converted them to a large, communal dining table for a café in Soho. I love the furniture business. I love to work with my hands. I love that I can work with wood while living in the middle of New York City."

New York City? Who would have thought to look for him there?

Through the years, while Moe was criss-crossing the country, his name has come up on numerous occasions among those associated with Princeton lacrosse. Not once did anyone know where he was.

It only added to the mystique that has always been Andy Moe.

He was recruited to Princeton by Jerry Schmidt, but he never played a game for the man who recruited him. Instead, when he arrived in the fall of 1988 from St. Albans in Washington, D.C., he found himself part of Bill Tierney's first Princeton team.

"Andy's always been his own spirit," says Tierney. "I really didn't know much about him. I'm not sure who he hung around with, but he wasn't a loner. Everyone liked Andy. I never worried about him."

And?

"And he was fast. Very, very fast."

Tierney's first two teams went 2-13 and 6-8, but Moe began to buy into what his new coach was preaching.

"Some of my most vivid memories are of my first two years, especially in the locker room after we'd lose" Moe says. "Tierney would come in and give a speech, a new spontaneous speech every week, just talking about the importance of staying with something, instilling within us what he believed to be the attributes of a winner. For him to do that in the face of continuous losing was an amazing thing. I would say he's easily one of the most inspiring people I've ever had the pleasure of being associated with."

Moe decided to take the 1990 school year off, and the program was in a much different state when he returned. The Tigers made the NCAA tournament for the first time in 1990, and, upon Moe's return, Princeton lost a heartbreaking 14-13 triple-overtime quarterfinal game to Towson at Palmer Stadium. That set the stage for the 1992 season.

"I had the feeling that when he left, lacrosse was very important to him," says Tierney. "We were 2-13 and then 6-8, and I felt that I was responsible for his being discouraged about lacrosse. When we started to win, he was really enthusiastic when he came back. For me, he bought into what we were doing. He got us through a lot of games."

Moe was more than just a player who happened to score a huge goal. He scored 68 goals in his career, 19 as a senior to earn third-team All-America honors. Four of his goals came in the championship game against Syracuse.

"Every experience was new for us," says Moe. "Even getting to the Final Four was a novel experience. I remember very clearly that when I first arrived in Philadelphia, I was just happy to be there. Then T sent Metz out to scout the other semifinal game, and I said to myself that he was focused on winning the whole thing. I was really struck by that. This was someone who was thinking in large terms, and we went along."

Princeton defeated North Carolina 16-14 on a broiling hot day at Franklin Field in the semifinals, earning a spot opposite Syracuse in the final. Moe scored one of the Princeton goals against the Tar Heels, and, though the temperature dropped nearly 40 degrees for the championship game, Moe was just heating up.

Moe scored 32 seconds into the championship game to give Princeton the early lead, which grew to 6-0 when he scored his second midway through the second quarter. Even after Syracuse scored, Moe answered 41 seconds before intermission.

Syracuse came charging back in the second half, tying the score at 8-8 with 8:24 to go before Greg Waller scored with 2:37 go play to make it 9-8 Princeton. It looked like that would be the final score when Syracuse was called for a penalty with 1:30 to go, but the Orange were able to get possession and take advantage of a crazy hop off the turf to get Tom Marechek an uncontested goal with just 42 seconds to play to tie it at 9-9.

Justin Tortolani hit the pipe in the final 10 seconds of regulation, and the game went to a first overtime, where Kevin Lowe of Princeton and Dom Fin of Syracuse both had chances to end it. After four scoreless minutes, it was off to a second overtime.

Waller then won the face-off in Moe's direction, and Moe picked it up and started to sprint to the goal.

"It was a normal 4 on 3 fast break," Tierney says. "Taylor [Simmers], for some reason, cut through, and the Syracuse guy went with him. That left Andy alone. He was going too fast to pass, so he had to shoot it."

Shoot it he did, skipping it into the Syracuse goal for the first of the six NCAA championships Tierney has won at Princeton.

"It happened very quickly," Moe remembers. "I remember after the ball went in that it was like being in a state of shock. I knew so clearly how it felt to lose, but I never really had experienced what it was like to win on a level like that.

"I had developed a shot where I would look down as if shooting to a lower corner of the goal and then shoot into the upper corner when the goalie would drop his stick. When I ran down, I did that move. I looked down with the intention of shooting in the upper corner. The ball ended up in a lower corner anyway, right where I was looking. The goalie kept his stick high. If the ball went where I had intended, we may not have won. Because the goal ended up going in a place I hadn't intended, I really felt that I couldn't claim credit fully for what happened. I've always had a curious relationship with that goal."

Except for a few very isolated games of catch a long time ago, Andy Moe has never played lacrosse again.

* * *

The recent event in New York City was the first real connection that Moe has had with his Princeton past since attending Justin Tortolani's wedding 12 years ago.

Out of sight, but as it turns out, hardly out of mind. At least not Andy Moe's mind.

"It was great to see everyone, to see T," Moe says. "It brought me back to all the times I heard him speak as a player. I was struck again by the integrity of the man. I've thought a lot about him since I've graduated. I feel like I carry with me a whole education in itself, a Tierney education, which is all about character. It has served me well since my graduation."

The coach himself was not unmoved by the reunion with the player who had done so much for him so many years earlier.

"It was awesome to see him," Tierney says. "People were walking up to him, shaking his hand. It was like he was a rock star. Everything about him is unique. Throwing the equipment off the bridge. You hope you never lose stuff like that.

"Lacrosse needs its legends."

Lacrosse needs legends like Andy Moe.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jerry Price is Associate Director of Athletics and Athletic Communications at Princeton University

[Jim Hyla]

[quote billhoward]From the Baltimore Sun.>>> It's different at Albany, and a lot of times coaches from up north don't get enough credit. It's much easier to recruit players to the South on campuses at Virginia, Duke and North Carolina than it is places like Albany, Massachusetts and even Syracuse. A lot of northern teams seldom get outside to practice until midway in the season, putting them at a big disadvantage.

... Syracuse? Winter? Outdoor practice disadvantage?[/quote]Indeed it's true. You forget that b'ball is played up here and it's king. SU does practice outdoors in the spring/ winter. Yes they get to get into the dome, but only half field when the court is down. That's like CU being in the fieldhouse, not the best way to practice transition.

As for your other post, you've outdone yourself again.::pop::