Acrosse the College Lacrosse Polls: See You in Hell, 2012!

The final poll is out -- Media-- and Loyola is the media's year-end darling. This seems especially important as media members need to confirm that the Greyhounds won the national championship on Memorial Monday and that is not considered a fact until it is duly recorded in aggregated voting format. The fate of the American democracy rests on this happening, people.

I'm not sure what any of this means at this point in the year. Polls kind of give people an expectation of what's going to happen in the coming days; without games on the docket, simply looking back at the year that was and slotting teams into positions seems a little odd. This seems like a time to break apart what happened during the 2012 season and look ahead to 2013, not confirm what already happened this past spring. May the coaches poll is on to something (they don't compile a year-end tally).

Anyway, here's this week's poll aggregation featuring teams situated in any set of rankings' top ten. Some brief thoughts follow after the jump.

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.

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. I've included these rankings this week because I am, apparently, as stupid as everyone and everything else.

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).)

PYTH.: This is a Pythagorean win expectation. You can see more at Tempo Free Lax.

AVG.: Average of the "math" rankings.

MEDIA: This is the media poll, juding humans simply to sell ink and paper. This polls is from May 29, 2012. The coaches poll does not contribute a postseason tally, so it has been eliminated this week.

AVG.: This is the average the Earth-human poll.

DIFF.: The difference between the "math" polls and the human poll. 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.

More after the jump.

• Obligatory Princeton Pump-Up: I've given up on you people. The Tigers were a blocked shot away from potentially moving on to the NCAA Tournament semifinals. They played Virginia, a team that ended up in the media poll as a top-five squad, to the final whistle in what was one of the sloppiest games played this season. Is a two-game losing streak at the end of the year enough to say that Tom Schreiber and Friends weren't a top-10 team? Every other ranking tool -- with the exception of the silly RPI -- shows the Tigers as a quality team. And yet, here we are; Princeton is apparently no better than a North Carolina team that didn't play any defense this season and vacillated between being a tire fire and a competitive club.
• Man, People Hate Massachusetts: It takes a special kind of disgust to drop a team from number one in the human polls all the way to 10th. I guess losing to an undervalued Colgate team can do that (if you enjoy head wounds). I'm not saying that the Minutemen were the class of the country this year, but you have a hard time convincing me that there are more than eight teams that were decidedly better than Massachusetts the entire season. It's a shame that Greg Cannella's club will finish the year at the back end of a human tally. That's a heavy hit for being "exposed."