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The latest Division I lacrosse rankings are out (right here).
Honestly, looking at the below aggregation, the tournament selection committee:
- Arguably got the 10-best at-large teams into the field. The only beef -- if we look at tournament selection via poll rankings rather than cockamamie tournament section criteria -- is probably with the Pennsylvania-Stony Brook selection/non-selection. The Seawolves, though, did themselves no favors losing to a vastly inferior Hartford squad in the America East Tournament final. If we're going to shout about one at-large inclusion out of 10, I think it's getting hoarse for a silly reason.
- Did a fairly good job of getting the seeding on point. There's a one-spot derivation for a few schools with the largest (Carolina seeded at eight and Maryland unseeded) only being off by a spot or two. So, good on that, I suppose.
Otherwise, this aggregation doesn't mean a hell of a lot right now other than possibly giving you a little information to help you fill out your bracket. Here's last week's aggregation in case you want to see who moved where and why.
(SPOILER: Notre Dame and Hopkins flip-flopped; Virginia and Maryland flip-flopped; Bucknell jumped Hofstra and Villanova; North Carolina re-entered the aggregation based on their human poll tallies; and Stony Brook slid back a bit.)
| TEAM | LAXPOWER | RPI | EFFICIENCY | AVG. | COACHES | MEDIA | AVG. | DIFF. | AVG. |
| Cornell | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1.33 | 2 | 2 | 2.00 | -067 | 1.60 |
| Syracuse | 3 | 1 | 3 | 2.33 | 1 | 1 | 1.00 | 1.33 | 1.80 |
| Johns Hopkins | 2 | 4 | 6 | 4.00 | 3 | 3 | 3.00 | 1.00 | 3.60 |
| Notre Dame | 4 | 3 | 2 | 3.00 | 5 | 5 | 5.00 | -2.00 | 3.80 |
| Denver | 7 | 6 | 4 | 5.67 | 4 | 4 | 4.00 | 1.67 | 5.00 |
| Duke | 8 | 7 | 5 | 6.67 | 6 | 6 | 6.00 | 0.67 | 6.40 |
| Virginia | 5 | 5 | 7 | 5.67 | 10 | 9 | 9.50 | -3.83 | 7.20 |
| Maryland | 6 | 12 | 11 | 9.67 | 8 | 7 | 7.50 | 2.17 | 8.80 |
| Bucknell | 12 | 8 | 9 | 9.67 | 7 | 10 | 8.50 | 1.17 | 9.20 |
| North Carolina | 9 | 10 | 17 | 12.00 | 9 | 8 | 8.50 | 3.50 | 10.60 |
| Hofstra | 11 | 11 | 8 | 10.00 | 13 | 11 | 12.00 | -2.00 | 10.80 |
| Villanova | 13 | 9 | 13 | 11.67 | 11 | 12 | 11.50 | 0.17 | 11.60 |
| Stony Brook | 10 | 13 | 10 | 11.00 | 16 | 17 | 16.50 | -5.50 | 13.20 |
LAXPOWER: These are the LaxPower ratings. These ratings are based on solid math, similar to Jeff Sagarin's rankings. Importantly, they consider margin of victory and where a game was played.
RPI: This is stupid person math. I include these rankings only because the NCAA is full of stupid people and they still use this stupid person math as a major piece of their stupid tournament selection criteria.
EFFICIENCY: This is just a ranking of a team's efficiency margin, as adjusted for strength of schedule. These are similar to Ken Pomeroy's rankings, but slightly different. (Pomeroy uses win expectation as the basis of his ratings. We each, however, use the same foundation (efficiency).)
AVG.: Average of the "math" rankings.
COACHES/MEDIA: These are the human polls, as voted on by humans. These humans have different jobs, though: One set judges humans while clad in university-issued apparel; the other set of humans judges others simply to sell ink and paper. These polls are from May 9, 2011.
AVG.: This is the average the Earth-human polls.
DIFF.: The difference between the "math" polls and the human polls. A negative value means that "math" is rating a team higher than the things that are carbon-based; the inverse means that the things made out of 75% water are rating a team higher than the things not made out of any water.
AVG.: Average of the math and human polls. This is how the table is ordered.