[Off-topic] Lacrosse

[jtwcornell91]

I used to talk about baseball on the old CHDF. :-D

Actually, I was going to mention the tiebreakers for the Swiss Baseball and Softball Federation.  Not being as tiebreaker-obsessed as we Americans, they only had one or two tiebreakers, but they made a distinction between tiebreaking to determine seeding and tiebreaking to determine who made the playoffs, got relegated, etc.  In the former case, they drew lots as the final step; in the latter case, they had a playoff game.  (Of course, the whole thing was not written too clearly, since the first (and basically only) tiebreaker was head-to-head results (Direktergebnis), but there was some difference of opinion as to whether that included net runs if the teams split the season series.  (It did, as it turned out, and as I recall the Cardinals took third place as a result.)

[Susan Newman 08]

heh..baseball? whats that? ::snore::

[DeltaOne81]

Technically Cornell doesn't play any more hockey games this season, so it IS the off-season, unfortunately it just started earlier than at 4 other schools.

Well, with the ice having been melted last night, it's as hockey-off-season as it gets around here :-/

Ah, okay, so technically technically, it's the Cornell hockey off-season, but not the hockey off-season. Before it sounds like I'm being picky for picky's sake, the point of my last post was meant to be that, even though our beloved boys may be hitting the links, there's still some of the greatest sport left. I just meant it as "hey, there's some hockey left!"

You could even argue it's not really the off-season until the NHL finishes up in late August or whatever it is now ::rolleyes:: , but we'll not go there.

-Fred, DeltaOne81

P.S. I'm probably only posting because it's either that or study ;-)

[jtwcornell91]

Well, it'll be the college hockey offseason in a couple of days. :`(

[CowbellGuy]

Of course, I'll end up catching up on those game clips, making the DVD archives, and overhauling eLynah all summer, so it usually feels a lot like a year-round thing for some of us ::rolleyes:: .

[Lowell '99]

You know, this ::rolleyes::  smiley is eerily similar to Age's REAL facial expressions.

[jkahn]

Al, my recollection of the '71 tournament seedings is somewhat different.  Teams were seeded 1 through 8, with Army #2 and Cornell #3.  Perhaps there was a conscious effort when they did the seedings to regionalize by putting more northern teams in the 2,3,6,7 bracket and southern teams in the 1,4,5,8 bracket.  The first two rounds were at campus sites.  I was at the game at Army which we won 16-15 or 17-16.  In the 2nd half, the lead see-sawed back and forth, and it seemed that whoever won the face-off scored.  Tom Cafaro for Army was virtually unstoppable once he got the ball, but fortunately we won enough face-offs.
Whoever was the #1 seed (Navy or Virginia maybe?) lost early and Maryland was either the 8,5 or 4.  However, back then the Ivies didn't schedule any of the traditional powers, so most of the experts still considered us an unproven team until the final, where we dominated easily (I was at that one also).  The Army game, however, was the best lacrosse game I've ever seen, by far.

[Al DeFlorio]

Well, the first round games were Cornell-Brown and Army-Hofstra in the "north," and Navy-Virginia and Maryland-Air Force (obligatory western team, clearly regarded as the weakest team in the tournament--Maryland 10, AF 1) in the "south."  In the semifinals, Maryland beat Navy and Cornell beat Army, 17-16, and the rest is history.  As I recall, the pairings were specifically done to keep it "regional" until the finals--causing major gas pains down Bal-mer way.

[jkahn]

Al, maybe my recollection of Army being #2, Cornell #3 and Navy or Va. #1 were the rankings going into the tournament and not seedings.  Unfortunately, recollections are not quite as sharp as the facts.

[Al DeFlorio]

According to Bob Kane's Good Sports, going into the tournament Army was ranked first and Cornell eighth in the polls, which I think were conducted by the USILA--the anointers of the national champion prior to 1971.

My recollection is that back in those days the NCAA basketball tournament was much more "regionalized," too.

Incidentally, Cornell finished the 1972 season with a 10-3 record when they were not invited to defend their championship.

[zg88]

Here's a list of all the NCAA lax tourney games ever played:

http://www.ncaalacrosse.com/news/lac/mlac/2000/04/19/956157933791.html

(Unfortunately, they didn't bother to list the seeding-#'s... (That's the NCAA for ya...))  ::rolleyes::

The above link is from the NCAA's lax history page (below), which has lots of other tourney-related links:

http://www.ncaachampionships.com/0,5920,1_714_0_9645,00.html


If you assume (yeah, yeah, I know -- I'm givin' 'em way too much credit...) that the tournament teams are listed according to the usual [1-8, 2-7, 3-6, 4-5] order, then it would seem to suggest the following seedings for 1971 (with 1st-round scores):

1971
First Round:
#1 Cornell 10, #8 Brown 8
#2 Maryland 10, #7 Air Force 1
#3 Navy 9,  #6 Virginia 6
#4 Army 19, #5 Hofstra 3

(EDIT:  Ummm... heh-heh...  Further investigation reveals that the NCAA -- as I suspected might be the case -- listed the tournament pairings in mixed-up order... so... uhh... nevermind my numberings above... sorry...)

However, I find it a bit hard to believe (particularly if, as Al said, Army was 1st in the "pre-tourney" poll and Cornell was only 8th) that the "smoky-room boyz" would bestow such an honor (the top seed) upon the "upstart-northerner" Big Red.  Heck, they had gone 11-0 in their previous ('70) campaign (and had finished with a 17-game winning streak) and were only voted the #5 team in the nation (IIRC) at the end of that final season of the pre-tourney era.

In 1971, even though Cornell was 10-1 at the end of the regular season (and had won 27 of its last 28 at that point!), they hadn't "beaten anyone" -- their only "real game" was their lone loss (by one goal to Virginia to start the season).  So, from the good ol' boys' point of view, the Big Red were still "nobodies" -- thus the extra sweetness of crushing Maryland for that inaugural NCAA tournament championship!  B-]


Regarding Air Force in the '71 tourney:  It appears that the NCAA dropped the concept of "token western team" participation after that initial (and dismal) experiment.  A "token" didn't re-appear in the tourney until the field was expanded to its current, 12-team format in '87.  That's when they offered up Michigan St. as the sacrificial "west-of-the-Appalachians" lamb (and they got stomped by the Tar Heels, 21-5).


> ...Cornell finished the 1972 season with a 10-3 record when they were not invited to defend their championship.

Funny thing about 1972:  When you scan Cornell's schedule for that year to find out why (other than the number of losses) they were not given the opportunity to defend their title, you see that one of the Big Red's 3 losses was to Cortland and you say to yourself, "Well, there you go -- that's why they were snubbed!"

On the other hand, that also happened to be THE year of glory for the Red Dragons:  They not only made their one-and-only (Div. I) NCAA tournament appearance (no doubt thanks to their win over defending-nat'l-champ. Cornell!), but they actually won a game and made it to the semi-finals!  (Think about that -- Cortland State in the lax "final four"!)  ::twitch::  (Different world 30 years ago...)

(Of course, another take on the "different-world-30-years-ago" concept is that there have only been 7 different national champions in the 31 years of the NCAA tournament... ahhh... the comforts of constancy... (Hmmm... that sounds like the name of a sermon by Reverend Lovejoy...))  ::nut::

(There's only been one newcomer to the "Club of Champions" in the last 18 years!  (Princeton, '92))  (Here's a brain teaser for ya:  Who will be the 8th member of the "club"?  (Loyola??  Georgetown??))  ::nut::  (Yes, when I ramble like that, it means I need sleepies...)  ::rolleyes::  ::help::  ::snore::

[ugarte]

Here's a list of all the NCAA lax tourney games ever played:
 

Almost all.  Somehow the worker bees at the NCAA haven't gotten around to adding the 2001 tournament to the site. ::rolleyes::

[Al DeFlorio]

That season-opening loss to Virginia was played April 1 in Charlottesville.  Kane mentions what a disadvantage that early date was to Cornell because--with no artificial turf at Schoellkopf at the time--Cornell had yet to practice outdoors.

Today April 1 is mid-season, in part due to the changed academic calendar.  (I would take finals on Memorial Day and graduated on a sunny June 14.)  One result of this, IMHO, is a shift of lacrosse power back to the south.  The only northern schools which contend regularly for the top ten spots today are Syracuse--which plays indoors--and Princeton--with the exception of Penn, the southernmost "northern" team.  To a kid from the northern tier of NY or Long Island, I'd think the Research Triangle would appear a more hospitable place than Ithaca or Hanover or Geneva to play an outdoor sport with a season beginning March 1.

[Al DeFlorio]

They also list Cornell in 1971 and Virginia in 1972 as "national champions prior to the NCAA tournament." ::help::

[jeh25]

First of all, great post.

I was poking around, trying to final a complete list of the GWLL champions over the history of the conference. In doing so, I discovered a couple of things.  

It looks like Fairfield joined the GWLL in 1999 or 2000 with the expressed purpose of bringing the league to 6 teams in order to qualify for an NCAA AQ.  I'd speculate that the Fairfield AD considered the high travel cost worth it in exchange for an AQ they might actually win once in a while. Considering that getting past Georgetown in the ECAC and Hobart in the Patriot League would be a tough nut to crack, this is probably a reasonable choice.  Still, America East doesn't seem like that tough a league and they have an AQ as well. I assume the Colonial League and the MAAC are still in their 2 year waiting period with respect to an AQ.

Turns out that even before the GWLL AQ, the NCAA did have a "western team" from '87 on,  as was stated above.  Notre Dame was the token western team in '90, '92 and '93 as the Great Lakes Conference Champion.  Every year from '94 to '00 save '98, they made the  tourney as the GWLL Champion.   I mention this because they made 9 NCAA appearances before getting their first win over Loyola in 2000.  I think this is relevent to hockey when considering the place of the MAAC in hockey.  We will be hearing CCHA and WCHA fans bitch about MAAC teams for a long time to come if it takes Mercyhurst or Quinnipiac that long to get a win. Yet, that is okay with me as I think it is good for the long term growth of the sport.

Anywho, I thought I had more to say but nothing is coming to mind. Mebbe I'll post more after I get some more kawphii.

Oh yeah. Wasn't Cortland State a dominant team in 1960's?