The #4 Notre Dame Fighting Irish were shockingly denied a spot in the ongoing NCAA Championship tournament.  This is the first time Notre Dame missed the tournament since 2005.

We debated how, and whether, to address this. The team handled it well, and the positive words of players like Quinn McCahon are a great example of the dignity and maturity of the student athletes.

Because we recognise we are shameless homers and not particularly objective, we sat on this for over a week. But we saw that were not alone in our disgust, and we are  genuinely fond of these students. We are appalled by how they were cast aside after a great season and the day after one of their most thrilling wins.

We decided we had an obligation to say what the team cannot: the exclusion of Notre Dame from the tournament was ridiculous and unjust. It probably will not make a difference, but the NCAA absurdity will not pass unmentioned and unchallenged.

ND-Atl 2.0 did not take a role in this editorial. It is best to keep the youngbloods out of this. We have instead consulted with our colleagues and commenters and are grateful for their input.

We must also add that no part of this should be read as a comment on the teams and students who were ultimately selected. We sincerely wish them all great success in the tournament.

The snub

Let’s take a look at where Notre Dame stood relative to the teams under consideration.

As a baseline, here is where the Irish stood in the polls, with yellow markings indicating teams who automatically qualified:

#4 Notre Dame, #5 Virginia, #11 Ohio State, #13 Duke, #14 Harvard

In the core RPI metric used by the committee, here is where the Irish stood:

The specific RPI percentage gap between the Irish and #7 Duke was significantly less than the gap between Notre Dame and Harvard.

The Irish were also similarly in good shape with strength of schedule, a formal metric, and in the adjusted strength of record (#9 vs. #16 and #18)

Historical context for selection relative to RPI:

Notre Dame’s snub was historically unique. Even in 2013, when RPI #11 Drexel was denied a bid, it was to RPI #12 and eventual National Champion Duke, and the committee thought enough of that Duke team to award them the #7 tournament seed. That committee did not exclude the 7th and 11th ranked teams to include the 13th and 15th.

This is not a selection criteria problem

The statistical significance of RPI to lacrosse has long been a subject of debate. We agree, it has many flaws, but selectors have made the best of it for many years. It may not be optimal, but it is understood, it is relied upon for scheduling, and it is generally accepted as the default metric which is to be given context by the other published criteria.

What happened this year is a human problem.

The Committee
  • Chairperson Donna Woodruff, Director of Athletics, Loyola.
  • Jordan Skolnick, Deputy Director of Athletics, Delaware
  • Brandon Mitchell, Deputy director of Athletics, Denver
  • Gregory Raymond, Hobart head coach.  We’ll give Coach Raymond a partial pass. they only team of consequence to this discussion that he faced was automatic qualifier St. Joseph’s.
  • Joe Breschi, UNC head coach. Coach Breschi deserves special mention in this fiasco. He had a front row seat to savage beatings of his UNC team issued by Notre Dame and Duke (2x), and he comfortably beat the Ivy League’s Brown. He is likely also familiar with his own 2016 national championship team (RPI #17) that was selected for the tournament they won on criteria that he should have applied to Notre Dame. It is a cruel irony that he should be central to Notre Dame’s absurd snub.

The absurdity is not the result of the metrics available to for use by the committee. It is exclusive and personal to the people on the committee. They alone did this.

They publicly commented on their decision. They themselves expressed their unfamiliarity with their role, their data, their metrics, and the teams involved. The numbers weren’t the problem. The ignorance of the folks reading them is.

Chairperson Woodruff was interviewed by Inside Lacrosse’s Terry Foy immediately after the selection show. She acknowledged her marginal familiarity with the metrics, but also noted perceived limitations of the data, such as not all wins and loses being equal or involving the same conditions. This, she notes, required the human involvement of the committee members (sounds like an eye test to us).

In the end, the committee used RPI, until it didn’t, used quality RPI wins, until they were inconvenient, and general applied criteria inconsistently.

If their explanations were not maddening enough regarding their reasoning for the exclusion of teams, this same committee noted it had doubts whether current ACC co-champion and 2-time defending national champion Virginia had earned a spot in the tournament.  If we needed further confirmation that the committee process was preposterous, they provided it by suggesting UVa was a bubble team.

The net result was a bracket that included 6 of 7 Ivy League teams, no #4 and ACC co-champion Notre Dame, and the only ACC representative being sent on the road to play a game.

Why this matters

This is not the only year with selection controversy, and we certainly agree that no selection criteria is ever going to have universal support, but the deviation from reality this year is beyond ridiculous.  The calls for new selection criteria are empty so long as there is no requirement that the humans involved apply them in a consistent and predictable matter. It might also help to know if the committee members had any familiarity with the games played.

More importantly, it matters to us because it happened to our Notre Dame boys, and there is no “next year” for nearly a third of them.  This group survived the Covid disruptions, worked incredible hard, were the #2 defense, #4 offense, and #4 team, and they were robbed of their chance. This will not be forgotten by us.

The Aftermath

We have no ill-will towards the teams that were ultimately selected, and we happen to be tremendous fans of the coaching staff of one of them, but it cannot go unnoticed that the teams were beaten soundly in the NCAA first round, 15-8 and 19-9.  The ACC’s sole representative went on the road and beat their seeded opponent 17-10 and awaits a quarterfinal date against #1 Maryland.  It is also not going unnoticed that the committee that snubbed Notre Dame also placed the likely deciding game for the national championship in a quarterfinal in Columbus, Ohio.

#GoIrish