(Photo Courtesy Rich Graesle/Rutgers Athletics)Welcome to Midseason Week on Inside Lacrosse. Tomorrow, we’ll roll out our midseason staff
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Early in the season, the challenge in this exercise of ranking teams is knowing who’s good. That’s an obvious statement, but what I specifically mean is that, in the first few weeks, it’s hard to know whether a win qualifies as “good” based on the combination of prior year performance, talent assessment and a one- or two-game sample size. At this point in the season, the challenge is identifying what a team has become in recent weeks. Teams are not static — they improve, they stagnate, they regress, they battle against fatigue, frustration and infighting, they benefit from good vibes and increased confidence. It can be hard to balance properly assessing what a team is now with its season-long performance.
Syracuse is a great example of this. I did not include them in my Top 20 this week, though many did coming off their win over Duke. How good is that Duke win? The Blue Devils have now lost to Jacksonville, Penn and Loyola (in addition to the Orange), and their best wins are over Denver, Richmond and High Point. The Greyhounds, who I also excluded from this week’s Top 20, have a very similar resume to ’Cuse — both have lost to Army, Hopkins and Maryland, each has a win over the Blue Devils and their second-best win is pretty equivalent: Loyola’s Bucknell win is probably better than ’Cuse’s Stony Brook or Hobart wins, but the Orange have one additional W.
To the extent that this exercise requires examining the team on the field, as opposed to just their body of work, Patrick McEwen pointed out that the Orange defense has skyrocketed up the efficiency ratings over the last three games (and that accounts for SOS, so exclude that argument) and, given they started two different goalies in those three games, credit is due to the likes of Grant Murphy, Nick Caccamo, Brett Kennedy, Brandon Aviles, Sam Olexo (whose playmaking has been awesome; I have him among the most underrated players in the country at this point) and others. At the offensive end, where their issues stemmed from being too reliant on Tucker Dordevic and Brendan Curry,
Dan Arestia pointed out that Matteo Corsi and Mikey Berkman have improved significantly in recent weeks, and those guys have stepped up in the wake of injuries to Lucas Quinn and Griffin Cook.
The Orange are 21st in RPI, which means they’re not currently a quality win by the NCAA Tournament selection committee standards and, as we also discussed on the Tailgate, don’t expect the normal “end of season ACC teams’ RPI improvement” with which we’re so familiar to occur this year — the ACC’s conference RPI lags behind the Ivy League’s and the Big Ten’s. Check out that conversation.
