THE 2019 Hopkins Lacrosse Fallout Shelter (44, we want more!)

[Big Dog]

Hopkins looked great last night. Firing on all cylinders. Definitely in the tournament and definitely primed to beat every team including PSU. Nothing can go wrong now.

don't start the bad juju.

[a fan]

I lay everything on leadership, good and bad, but here's the rub: I think the HOP kids took it upon themselves to wrestle these two games from UMD, not the coaches. These kids are proud warriors, and this season was fast-circling the drain after the PSU game.

So if they win, it's because of the kids, and despite the coaches.

And if they lose, it's entirely fault of the coach, and the kids aren't responsible at all.

Huh.

[houndace1]

... I'm so sorry Loyola lost tonight .. i'm really upset with their performance as they completely cost themselves a home game and shrunk the bubble even more after tonight. Just hope for Towson to win the CAA to preserve a spot. Also the RPI for both hopkins and loyola took a hit tonight.

Spencer had 1 point (an assist) but the entire offense just crapped the bed with 14 TO's. Credit Army for a great defensive effort. Stover really kept loyola in the game with all his saves but if you can't score goals then that effort will go to waste. the shots that loyola did take at barreto was just being saved by an other worldly effort.

Does tomorrow seem like a must win effort now for Hopkins?

[Hawkeye]

Just hope for Towson to win the CAA to preserve a spot.

Does tomorrow seem like a must win effort now for Hopkins?

CAA is now a true playoff game. The game is pretty much irrelevant to the rest of the at-large picture. Towson has very little chance at an at-large with a loss.

No, Hopkins is still safe. Cornell is the last piece of the puzzle.

4 ACC
PSU/JHU loser
Penn/Yale loser (both if Cornell wins AQ)
Loyola
Maryland (probably)

Cornell plays their way into serious at-large conversation if they beat Yale.

[houndace1]

Just hope for Towson to win the CAA to preserve a spot.

Does tomorrow seem like a must win effort now for Hopkins?

CAA is now a true playoff game. The game is pretty much irrelevant to the rest of the at-large picture. Towson has very little chance at an at-large with a loss.

No, Hopkins is still safe. Cornell is the last piece of the puzzle.

4 ACC
PSU/JHU loser
Penn/Yale loser (both if Cornell wins AQ)
Loyola
Maryland (probably)

Cornell plays their way into serious at-large conversation if they beat Yale.

sooo do we both root for Towson and Yale to win their respective games?

[HopFan16]

I think if Cornell beats Yale tonight, they're in over Maryland. Otherwise Cornell might be out. Would be interesting between Cornell and Towson if they both lose.

[Hawkeye]

sooo do we both root for Towson and Yale to win their respective games?

I'd say, yes, root for Yale. (I may or may not be wearing a Yale lacrosse shirt currently anyway )

As far as Towson, I'd say Towson winning makes Loyola approximately 1% more safe. So root for whichever team you like better (hate less?)

I think Loyola and Hopkins are both in regardless, though.

[Hawkeye]

I think if Cornell beats Yale tonight, they're in over Maryland. Otherwise Cornell might be out. Would be interesting between Cornell and Towson if they both lose.

I think if Cornell wins tonight it's going to be a heck of a discussion for the last spot or two.

Problem is that if Towson and Cornell both lose, it will now be close between them for the first spot out, not the last spot in.

[Homer]

I think given that Cornell>Towson>Hopkins on the field (and Cornell and Towson have better high-end wins BTW), the best you can say is that it's far from clear that in a direct comparison where you had to take just 1 or 2 of the 3 that Hop would be the one coming out on the right side of that.

There is absolutely no way you can say Cornell and Towson are better than Hopkins “on the field.” Right now, on the field, Hopkins is playing top-tier lacrosse.

DocBarrister

By "on the field" I meant head-to-head, as in the games were actually played on the field. Your subjective judgment about who's playing "top-tier lacrosse" is your own affair.

Man some of these posts are going to age very poorly by Sunday night.

Not sure exactly which posts you're referring to, but as far as I can tell the only ones who could get exposed on Sunday are the people saying Hopkins is a "lock," since they're the only ones claiming there's a certain outcome that couldn't conceivably happen. It doesn't falsify the claim that Hopkins wasn't a lock if Hopkins does get in.

If you go back a couple years the conventional wisdom around these parts was like "the committee is totally inscrutable, criteria seem to come and go every year, they're just making it up as they go along." Now the pendulum seems to have swung completely the other way to "the whole process can be modeled precisely in advance, they always take the teams with the best 'numbers,' and isn't it sad and hilarious how some people still go around acting like there's some ambiguity or subjectivity to who might get chosen."

I'd just like to pull us back to the middle ground of: "The range of criteria the committee gets to work with gives them multiple distinct decision strategies to choose among in comparing particular teams, and which they choose to emphasize will vary from situation to situation and year to year. You can only really call one team a 'lock' over another if that team would come out ahead on ALL possible comparisons; if not, there's some degree of uncertainty." That's my main thesis here, not that I know for sure how the committee's going to handle Hopkins or anybody else.

[Hawkeye]

Not sure exactly which posts you're referring to, but as far as I can tell the only ones who could get exposed on Sunday are the people saying Hopkins is a "lock," since they're the only ones claiming there's a certain outcome that couldn't conceivably happen. It doesn't falsify the claim that Hopkins wasn't a lock if Hopkins does get in.

If worst case scenario for Hopkins plays out - and Hopkins still gets in - how is it that Hopkins was anything other than a lock?

That's literally the definition of a lock.

[Homer]

Not sure exactly which posts you're referring to, but as far as I can tell the only ones who could get exposed on Sunday are the people saying Hopkins is a "lock," since they're the only ones claiming there's a certain outcome that couldn't conceivably happen. It doesn't falsify the claim that Hopkins wasn't a lock if Hopkins does get in.

If worst case scenario for Hopkins plays out - and Hopkins still gets in - how is it that Hopkins was anything other than a lock?

That's literally the definition of a lock.

Because what I'm saying is that how the committee evaluates Hopkins is itself a source of uncertainty. Is this year's committee slanted towards people who are RPI/SOS fundamentalists? Then, heck, they might even give Hopkins a seed. Are they more interested in QWs? Suddenly Hopkins, with a pretty anemic 11, 11, 17 to stack up against others with top 5/10 wins, doesn't look so good at all. How much do they ding other teams for "bad losses?" Is head-to-head going to be treated more like an absolute trump card or more like the 5th tiebreaker? And so on.

We'll know (or be able to infer) most of these things after the bracket comes out. We don't know them NOW. So maybe Hop gets their worst case scenario on the field the next couple days, but they still get a committee that inclines to the metrics that best favor them. In that case, whoop-de-doo, I'm glad they got in. But it won't have made them a "lock" from the perspective of what we know as of 5/3.

[Hawkeye]

Okay, I understand what you are saying. However, with this perspective, I don’t know if locks of any kind exist in this sport.

[Homer]

Okay, I understand what you are saying. However, with this perspective, I don’t know if locks of any kind exist in this sport.

I take your point -- some of this is maybe just semantics about what's the tipping point where "it would seriously not make sense to me if this team were left out" becomes "this team's a lock."

I know you've been doing tremendous work in tracking these things pretty meticulously throughout the season. I wonder if you wouldn't mind doing me a small favor and laying out the case for why you'd see Towson (with a loss to Drexel) as unambiguously behind Hopkins (with a loss to PSU) in a potential AL scenario. It's not a gotcha question, I'm genuinely curious what I might be missing here.

What I'd see is RPI's are basically a wash (8 vs. 10 according to Laxbytes in that scenario). One team's got the better win % and worse SOS, the other vice versa; RPI's basically my go-to for SOS-adjusted record (not really, but imagining myself as a committee member), and, again, wash.

Towson's wins are better. Current 7, 9, 18 versus 11, 11, 17. Plus, one of those wins was head-to-head over Hopkins. And another was over one of two common opponents, which Hopkins lost to. (Common games are Towson 3-0 vs. Hopkins 1-1.)

So right now I'm liking Towson. BUT they (hypothetically) do have this semi-bad loss to current #27 (prospective #25) Drexel. How much does that change things? Is the whole case for Towson needing the AQ based on how damaging that loss would be? I'm really asking here.

[HopFan16]

Okay, I understand what you are saying. However, with this perspective, I don’t know if locks of any kind exist in this sport.

I take your point -- some of this is maybe just semantics about what's the tipping point where "it would seriously not make sense to me if this team were left out" becomes "this team's a lock."

I know you've been doing tremendous work in tracking these things pretty meticulously throughout the season. I wonder if you wouldn't mind doing me a small favor and laying out the case for why you'd see Towson (with a loss to Drexel) as unambiguously behind Hopkins (with a loss to PSU) in a potential AL scenario. It's not a gotcha question, I'm genuinely curious what I might be missing here.

What I'd see is RPI's are basically a wash (8 vs. 10 according to Laxbytes in that scenario). One team's got the better win % and worse SOS, the other vice versa; RPI's basically my go-to for SOS-adjusted record (not really, but imagining myself as a committee member), and, again, wash.

Towson's wins are better. Current 7, 9, 18 versus 11, 11, 17. Plus, one of those wins was head-to-head over Hopkins. And another was over one of two common opponents, which Hopkins lost to. (Common games are Towson 3-0 vs. Hopkins 1-1.)

So right now I'm liking Towson. BUT they (hypothetically) do have this semi-bad loss to current #27 (prospective #25) Drexel. How much does that change things? Is the whole case for Towson needing the AQ based on how damaging that loss would be? I'm really asking here.

Hopkins is #5 in "average RPI win" and #4 in "average RPI loss," which we know are criteria the committee uses. Towson is #10 and #13 in those metrics, respectively. I also don't think the 8 vs. 10 RPI is necessarily a nontrivial difference.

I don't see a scenario in which it comes down to solely Towson vs. Hopkins, though. Maryland is more likely to be the other team in a 1v1 resume matchup. (This is all assuming Cornell wins tonight.)

[Hawkeye]

I know you've been doing tremendous work in tracking these things pretty meticulously throughout the season. I wonder if you wouldn't mind doing me a small favor and laying out the case for why you'd see Towson (with a loss to Drexel) as unambiguously behind Hopkins (with a loss to PSU) in a potential AL scenario.

It's some of what HopFan said - that there are metrics that are already heavily in Hopkins' favor - and also some of how damaging the loss to Drexel would be to Towson on top of that. A Hopkins loss to Penn State would be about as positive as a loss could possibly ever be.

I think it was close between Towson and Hopkins heading into this week, and I gave the edge to Towson based on their head-to-head win. In the scenario where we're talking about these two teams on Sunday both looking for an at-large, I don't think it's close enough for the head-to-head to matter any more.

Hopkins this week has secured a good win (RPI ~11-12) over Maryland and would take a loss to the #1 team in RPI.
Towson would have an non-top 30 RPI win over Delaware and a terrible loss to Drexel.

I will expand more on this tomorrow morning when I post my penultimate bracketology post, but that's the gist of it. In this scenario, Towson's metrics are more in line with Denver and UNC's than they are with the last at-large teams to make the field.

Roughly where these two teams would fall in this scenario
Hopkins: 8 RPI, 1 SOS, 15 QW, 5 RPIW, 3 RPIL
Towson: 10 RPI, 13 SOS, 18 QW, 10 RPIW, 21 RPIL

Not close enough for the head-to-head to flip it in my mind. Maryland is the only team that I could possibly see them getting in over, and it's a long shot in my mind.

[WOMBAT, Mod Emeritus]

Okay, I understand what you are saying. However, with this perspective, I don’t know if locks of any kind exist in this sport.

Have you seen Cole’s hair?

[Hawkeye]

Okay, I understand what you are saying. However, with this perspective, I don’t know if locks of any kind exist in this sport.

Have you seen Cole’s hair?

Touché, he got that flow going.

[WOMBAT, Mod Emeritus]

COPULATE THE MATH

JUST BEAT PENN STATE

KILL THEM ALL

LET GOD SORT THEM OUT

KILL KILL KILL

[44WeWantMore]

Veins in my teeth

[DALaxDad]

So Wombat, how’s the anger therapy going?
I’m watching Cornell vs Yale. Why is Morrill in Yale blue with his pedigree?