NCAA Awards Surprise Bid

After Saturday’s triple-overtime loss to Dartmouth, everyone on the Harvard men’s lacrosse team thought the season was over—and no one was satisfied.

This had been their year to make the tournament, their year to show the national lacrosse community that the Crimson was a force to reckon with.

After the bids were announced last Sunday night, everything changed.

To the surprise of coaches, players, and fans, the Crimson received one of the 10 at-large bids handed out by the Division I men’s lacrosse selection committee to enter the NCAA tournament unseeded.

The squad will try and get through Syracuse on Sunday in order to face either Penn or Johns Hopkins in the second round of play, which is as far as it reached in its last tournament appearance in 1996. The selection is the team’s fifth overall.

“Syracuse, it’s like the mecca of lacrosse up there,” co-captain Jake Samuelson said. “We’re excited because if we could’ve played anyone, this is who we really wanted.”

Before the game against the Big Green, the squad needed a number of games to go a certain way: Hofstra to beat Delaware, Johns Hopkins to defeat Loyola, Georgetown over Penn State, Syracuse over Colgate, Ohio State’s to beat Army, and Albany to defeat Stony Brook.

After each match went as the Crimson hoped, Harvard’s fate rested in its own hands.

But for the first time that weekend, things did not go as the Crimson wanted: the 14-13 Dartmouth victory seemed to end all hopes for a berth.

“We had a reception and seniors were talking about how we were going to miss each other, how we wished we had one more game,” Samuelson said. “It’s like redemption, like we’re back from the dead.”

So the question still remains, how did this happen?

Last Saturday six spots had already been decided, including Cornell, Denver, and Navy, while the committee filled the other ten bids on Sunday.

According to primary selection criteria, at-large teams are selected based on three major categories: wins against teams in descending order of ranking in the ratings percentage index (RPI)—1-5 is worth five points, 6-10 four points, 11-15 three points, 16-20 two points, and all other wins one point—in addition to strength of schedule index, determined by how each team performs against its tough opponents; and normal RPI rank, based on winning percentage, opponent’s record, and opponent’s strength of schedule.

Harvard stacks up at 19th in the first category and 17th in the other two. So there must have been something else at play in the decision, given that only 16 teams are selected.

“I wasn’t surprised, but [before the announcement] I really was unsure of the outcome,” Crimson coach Scott Anderson said. “There are all kinds of factors that can be considered. I know by the factors that ultimately turned out to be most important [that] we would be strong, but there’s always an element of subjectivity.”

According to Anderson, it is likely that quality wins and strength of schedule were highly weighted, as the squad notched 14th in the former and sixth in the latter.

In addition to taking a victory against Penn, Harvard defeated Denver, who received an automatic bid, and Stony Brook, who was on the bubble.

Three other Ivy League teams—the Quakers, Princeton, and Cornell—will also enter tournament play this weekend, which may have bolstered Harvard’s resume.

“All four teams that are in had quality wins,” Anderson said. “It was very similar to what happens in a league like the ACC that competes in a league tournament to allow themselves to use each other as quality wins: it supports your strength of schedule. That’s happening in a more natural way in our league.”

In the end, it does not matter how the Crimson reached the tournament. This weekend, Harvard is going to go out and show that the team is exactly where it should be.

“We’ve seen people talking about other teams that should’ve made it over us—they think Syracuse will pound us,” Samuelson said. “We have something to prove. We don’t think it’s a mistake—we’re ready to go. It’s not something we take lightly.”

—Staff writer Madeleine I. Shapiro can be reached at mshapiro@fas.harvard.edu.