The Crazy World Of Ivy Men's Lacrosse

The weekly men's lacrosse rankings are fairly interesting.

Princeton is ranked sixth by both the USILA coaches' poll and the Inside Lacrosse media poll. That's fair enough. 

If you look a bit closer, Princeton is ranked directly behind Georgetown, Rutgers and Penn. What do those there teams have in common? Princeton beat all three of them.

On the other hand, Princeton is ranked two spots ahead of Yale. That's the same Yale team that just defeated Princeton 14-12 last weekend in New Haven.

Has that ever happened in rankings history before?

There are four Ivy teams in the top eight, with Cornell at No. 7, just ahead of Yale. It's not that easy to rank these teams when Yale has beaten Princeton who beat Penn who beat Cornell who beat Yale.

Again, has this ever happened before? 

Where would TigerBlog rank Princeton? He wouldn't give it any thought at all, since it doesn't really matter at this point, not with the way the Ivy League is playing. All Princeton can do is worry about the challenge in front of it, which this week means a trip to Brown.

There are all kinds of interesting things going on in the world of Ivy League men's lacrosse this year. Of the seven teams, five are currently ranked in the top 10, with Harvard at No. 10. Brown has been ranked (and will be again if it wins this weekend). Dartmouth has been receiving votes.

That's not bad for a league that had exactly three USILA preseason All-Americans. Not per team. Total. And none of them were from Princeton. 

By contrast, Georgetown had six by itself. Maryland had five. Notre Dame had four. Rutgers, Loyola, Virginia and Duke all had three, tying the Ivy League all by themselves.

Inside Lacrosse will be releasing its midseason All-American team tomorrow. TB is guessing there will be more than three Ivy players on it.

Granted, it was hard to know what was going to be happening in Ivy League men's lacrosse after missing last year. So why is Ivy League men's lacrosse so strong this year?

It's easy to say the reason is that each team is playing with players from five classes, after so many players took the year off last year. TB doesn't buy that, because even with those players back, it's still a league in which nearly half of the players had never played in a game before and nearly three-quarters had played in five games or fewer.

Also, you have to factor in that every league team lost more than a year of skill development and team building, or at least the parts that come with playing a season. 

All seven teams have been recruiting well, obviously, since the talent level across the board is tremendous. Beyond that, they all owe a debt a gratitude to every upperclassman who helped keep the teams' cultures going and who kept the team connections strong.

The result has been a great first half of the season for the league. Five in the top 10? That's unprecedented.

What happens from here will be even crazier. Of those five teams in the top 10, at least one and possibly up to three will not be participating in the Ivy League tournament in May. Every game is huge.

To date there have been six Ivy League men's lacrosse games. The home team is 6-0 in those games. There have been three one-goal games and a two-goal game. 

For Princeton, the task now is the one in Providence (game time is noon, by the way, having been changed from 1). Who were the three players who led Princeton with two goals each the last time the Tigers beat Brown at Brown? Mike MacDonald, Alex Capretta and Hunter deButts. That was in 2012.

Brown is unranked after a loss to UMass last weekend, but the Bears are what they always are: tough-minded, fast-paced, deep and athletic. 

The last three Princeton games have seen a total of 304 shots. Hmmm. That seems like an average of more than 100 per game. 

TB wishes he had a way to look up if that's the most ever for Princeton over a three-game stretch. 

No matter, it's not that big of a stretch to think that it'll stretch out to at least 400 over four games. In the meantime, you also have Penn at Yale and Cornell at Dartmouth (Harvard hosts Colgate). 

It's just another wild weekend in Ivy League men's lacrosse, which in 2022, is what it is every weekend.