Mount St. Mary's athletic director Chappy Menninger chairs the men's lacrosse committee that will select nine at-large teams and seed the NCAA tournament.
Its work will be revealed tonight, but the addition of three more at-large berths than there were in 2002 and the expansion of the field to 16 teams doesn't make deliberations any less delicate for an event that concludes Memorial Day at Ravens Stadium.
"I'm not naive enough to think that there aren't going to be just as many teams on the bubble with a 16-team field as there were with 12," Menninger said. "One thing hasn't changed. You've got to win games to get into the tournament."
Luck is also involved. Dartmouth beat Harvard on Friday to gain a share of the Ivy League title with Princeton and Cornell, then won a blind draw last night to gain the league's automatic bid and secure its first NCAA berth.
Towson earned the Colonial Athletic Association title with last night's win over Hofstra, and Mount St. Mary's can become the seventh and final automatic qualifier with a victory over St. Joseph's in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference tournament final.
The other automatic qualifiers: Army, out of the Patriot League; Ohio State, the Great Western champion that will make its tournament debut; America East titlist Albany, another first-time participant; and Georgetown, which backed into the Eastern College Athletic Conference crown when Massachusetts lost to Rutgers.
The at-large selections and seeding weigh three factors, in order: how a team did against the top five in the RPI, the second five, etc.; strength of schedule; and the RPI itself, which gauges a team's record, its strength of schedule and its opponents' strength of schedule. Four seeds will be announced, but travel considerations and the pursuit of balance will massage the bracket.
The top four seeds figure to be Johns Hopkins, Virginia, Princeton and Maryland. Rutgers beat Syracuse and solidified its resume with the win over Massachusetts. Syracuse would appear to be another lock, as the defending champion won at Georgetown yesterday and remain the only team to beat the Blue Jays.
Massachusetts, No. 3 in The Sun/Channel 2 rankings, didn't play the strongest schedule, but it beat Georgetown and Syracuse. Seventh-ranked Hofstra lost to Towson twice, but the Pride beat Syracuse, Cornell and Duke. North Carolina lost to Navy, Notre Dame and UMBC, but has a top five win, as it beat Maryland.
