No team's NCAA lacrosse tournament seeding seemed out of whack to the common fan last weekend than North Carolina at No. 4.
No team's inclusion in the field seemed stranger than Denver's to that same group of people.
And after the first day of the tournament, both teams are heading home.
North Carolina, in fact, is already home, and may well be drowning its sorrows on Franklin Street by now.
Denver put up a decent fight before losing 10-7 to Maryland. Carolina, meanwhile, lost 8-7 to Navy.
The Pioneers had solid RPI and strength of schedule numbers, but other than a victory over relatively untested Notre Dame they had done little that at the time stood out as overly impressive.
The Tar Heels produced their typical 0-for-the-ACC and lost a neutral site game to Ohio State. They did beat Johns Hopkins, Notre Dame and Cornell, and wound up with a gaudy RPI and nation's top-ranked schedule. But good luck finding many people who ever thought Carolina was the fourth-best team in the country.
The selection committee used the criteria at its disposal, and based upon that selected the correct 16 teams.
But the criteria may well be flawed.
After watching Denver commit 29 turnovers at Byrd Stadium, it's tough to believe Georgetown wouldn't have fared a bit better (though the Hoyas still don't have anyone to blame but themselves for not making the tournament).
After listening to Carolina trail nearly the entire night to a Navy team that hadn't won in more than a month, it's tough to believe Johns Hopkins and Maryland should not have been seeded higher than the Tar Heels regardless of what the computer spit out.
One of the interesting quirks of the RPI in basketball is that it is generally considered wholly irrelevant until at least mid-January, when teams are about 15 games into the season. That, of course, is about what goes into an entire season of the lacrosse RPI.
It raises a valid statistical question: Is the sample size large enough to rely on RPI as nearly a third of the selection criteria?
Today's results should not be considered a rebuke of the committee members.
But it could be a sign the committee needs to re-evaluate the quality of the tools it is using.
--- Patrick Stevens
