Eulogizing the 2012 College Lacrosse Season: (32) Harvard

You spent the better part of four months meticulously dissecting the 2012 college lacrosse season. You shouldn't stop now because cold turkey is a bad way to go through life, man. College Crosse is providing decompression snapshots of all 61 teams and their 2012 campaigns, mostly because everything needs a proper burial.

I. VITAL SIGNS

Team: Harvard Crimson

2012 Record: 6-8 (2-4, Wine/Cheese/Hostile Corporate Takeover Conference)

2012 Strength of Schedule (Efficiency Margin): -0.65 (41)

2011 Strength of Schedule (Efficiency Margin): 1.07 (21)

Winning Percentage Change from 2011: -19.64%

2012 Efficiency Margin: 0.52 (32)

Efficiency Margin Change from 2011: -2.31

II. "ATTA BOY!" FACT

• The continued development of Daniel Eipp has been a huge coup for Harvard. With offensive flamethrower Jeff Cohen closing his Crimson career, the rising junior from Massachusetts is looking more and more like a suitable replacement for one of the best attack in the Ivy League. Eipp's year -- a season in which he complemented Cohen -- yielded a performance that ranked among the top-50 offensive players in the country, producing about nine adjusted points per 100 Harvard offensive possessions. What is most impressive about Eipp's stat sheet, though, isn't merely the volume of points he generated on a per-possession basis but rather its totality: 21 groundballs; 18 assists to complement 24 goals; a 34.3 shooting percentage; five man-up goals; and 812 minutes of play out of a possible 842. The USA U-19 player is starting to become an all around offensive asset and with two more years as a Crimson, Eipp could become one of the league's best.

III. "YOU'RE GROUNDED UNTIL YOU QUALIFY FOR THE AARP!" FACT

• As good as Eipp and Cohen were for Harvard in 2012, the entirety of the Crimson offense had a notable blind spot: The point of shooting is to beat the goaltender; Harvard attempted an abstract performance art to try and disprove that last year. Opponent netminders held an aggregated 53.2 save percentage against the Crimson while holding Harvard to only a 27.31 shooting percentage (43rd nationally). The inability for the Crimson to pick their spots yielded an opponent save-per-possession value that ranked only 55th in the country. In fact, only four guys on Harvard's roster that had at least 15 shots -- Eipp, Cohen, Will Walker, and Jack Walker -- managed to hold an individual shooting percentage above 30 percent. This is an offense that was pretty good in the overall, but the team's lack of accuracy likely mitigated the potential for the Crimson to find standing among the nation's best offenses.

IV. MR. FIX-IT HAS A ONE-FIX ENGAGEMENT, AND IT'S . . .

• Chris Wojcik has two seasons under his belt at Harvard as the program's head coach, but if the Crimson want to get where they seem to want to go -- to the top of the Ivy League and beyond -- Harvard is going to have to learn how to win. Programs with an established winning culture rarely (if ever) endure two three-game losing streaks during a single season. If Harvard wants to become a consistent player in the Ivy League with Cornell and Princeton, Wojcik is going to need to develop and nurture the kind of results that are concomitant with such programs. The players are there; it's a matter of mounting the hill at this point.