Johns Hopkins 2022

[51percentcorn]

Steel - my thoughts were not directed at you - I know you are in the anti Daniels camp and I will take your word, OC's word and others that he has executed poor decisions in terms of professors, doctors, administrators etc. I don't have one piece of knowledge or clue. We will have to agree to disagree that he should be assigned primary responsibility for the men's lacrosse team. I noticed crickets when I pointed out that Daniels committed $250,000 in matching funds for the JS foundation (which funds a lax scholarship if not mistaken). Why would he - on God's Green Earth - basically fund the extension of a lacrosse scholarship for 2 years (at its most base level) if he wants the program gone or DIII? Doesn't make any sense. No one would know he didn't authorize the funds. In fact, he authorized the funds last year according to the tribute ceremony. In addition, if he has such a jones for the lacrosse program why would he allow Petro to bring in 36 kids in two years? I do not want to insult any of these kids but I am willing to wager some of them did not meet the 4.5 GPA/1560 SAT/33 ACT or whatever Hopkins wants these days - If he hates the lacrosse program why would he be willing to live with that? He could easily say NO. South Park Chewbacca defense - doesn't make sense.

Why was there hope coming into this year? I'll give you my reasons and then offer why it didn't happen
- We saw a team that won 2 out its last 4 games and give the undefeated NCAA finalist 2 very close games and could have won either.
- That team had things this team simply does not - primarily health (or being healthier) and one player on offense that created a dynamic that helped alot
- The 21 team also showed some grit when the could have easily mailed it in at 3 points in the season - getting boat raced by OSU/Rutgers and Maryland at the beginning of the season, the Epstein controversy and losing to Michigan and Penn State and finally getting stabbed int he heart by Maryland in the regular season finale
So what happened:
- Narewski's injury set the team back - fewer possessions for a team that needs them - Callahan looks like he's coming on but it is a true idiot that thinks he could have won 60% from the start because he did it one game a week ago
- The absence of Williams and the inability to use Chauvette or others as a replacement completely altered the dynamic of the offense that was starting to appear at the end of last year. As I have said several times - this reduced the number of players who were effective dodgers by a significant magnitude and also made the team smaller and easier for defenses to deal with. Williams turns the corner - draws a slide either puts it behind or up top and the defense is rotating and more open shots from players are a result
- Many - including myself - were hopeful for significant breakout years from Peshko and Grimes - Grimes has missed 5 games and as a player who missed his junior year in high school with an injury - his senior year because of the pandemic - and no one can call '21 a normal year - he needed to stay on the field. I've been told Peshko has been battling injuries all year. Other players hopeful for breakouts - like McDermott have missed time and not progressed
- This seems somewhat similar to 2016 - boy even though Tinney's shot got deflected in the '15 semi - Hopkins faithful were geeked for 16. Shack/Brown/Tinney/Connor Reed/Crawley had just pumped in 4 goals in the semi - folks couldn't wait - until Tinney got suspended - knees started blowing up all over the place and folks realized there was no one but Nick Fields to play defense
- They are playing much better teams - last year they beat Penn State twice and Michigan once and of their 13 games 5 of them were against those teams - this year UVA/G'town/UNC etc.
- Saturday is their grit test

That is tough to say. I think if someone like Nads, or Raymond, or Marr had come in there would be more consistency in the program between staffs. You probably don't lose the entire recruiting class and have to restart because he can talk about being a Petro disciple and the only real change is the name and that it is still Hopkins traditions, etc. and they wouldn't change all of that. This is all conjecture on my part.

That's a timeline that would take some sleuthing to figure out - maybe another coach could have kept more of the recruits - Peden for example committed to Penn State on May 2 - 5 days after Milliman was hired - I doubt PM had time to call him and create a negative impression - vultures were circling since early April and it was going to be a tough deal to keep many of the more desired ones. Going to Brown and Yale are not exactly bad decisions.

Your post captures my sentiments, although I think you've said it a lot better than I would have.

That's a low bar - the lowest

Hopkins is a special place and unless you were part of that culture it's very difficult to have success here. I don't believe PM and company at this point will change that. Will Benson be the next HC here?

Delusion upon delusion upon delusion

[Hail to the Victors]

I have a question:
Would you - and you know who the collective "you" are - actually be happy if Hopkins beats Penn State? I know with absolute certainty what you'll do if they lose but if they win will it give you any of the emotional joy (for lack of a better phrase) that typically results from being a "fan" of a team? Will you think "good for them - they took the worst punch in the gut you could possibly take in a competition but they didn't quit"
And if they somehow were 10-4 next year and made the NCAAs - and clearly I am not saying that will happen - but if it did would you be happy? Would you sit in your La-Z-Boy and drink a beer to the Jays or would you seethe inside that you can't blame that on Ron Daniels - Jen Baker and Peter Milliman?

Your whole post is superb, but this especially is a great question. I certainly don't have a window into anybody's mind. But one thing that's become apparent to me over the past couple years is that there's a certain segment of the fan base that genuinely doesn't care about the wins and losses.

At least not around the margins. They might concede that going 16-3 and winning a National Championship is categorically good and going 2-12 is categorically bad, no matter who's at the controls. But they absolutely believe that going 7-8 with their guy at the helm is perfectly satisfactory and really the best anybody could possibly expect under the circumstances. And also that going 7-8 with some outsider who won't return their calls is a travesty and a farce and the poisoned fruit of Daniels's conspiracy to destroy the program.

And I ... guess I can't really fault them for that? I mean, it's harder to explain why you'd care about whether the team in the blue shirts or the team in the orange shirts throws the ball in the goal more times than it is to explain why you'd care about feeling like you and your friends are smart and competent and respected and deferred to and wanting to insulate that belief from the possibility that somebody else could walk in and do it better. The second thing is sort of obviously a more primal human urge, right?

What's weird here is that usually that dynamic doesn't play all that much of a role in sports fandom, but it seems to be more salient when it comes to Hopkins lacrosse. I think part of what's going on is that because the Hopkins fan base is defined less by caring about the school than by being connected geographically to the sport's traditional epicenter, it contains a number of people whose investment isn't really in seeing Hopkins win so much as it's in looking to whatever Hopkins is doing to vindicate a certain view of themselves and the people they grew up with as the proper custodians of the game.

In that perspective, your enemy isn't, like, say, Duke. You can always explain away the occasional first-round boatracing if necessary. Bet you didn't know Shack couldn't lift his arm above his shoulder? Etc. Your enemy is an administrator who says, forget you, you don't know what you're doing, I'm going to bring in somebody younger and cheaper and "socially awkward" (i.e., doesn't even pretend to like hanging out with you) and the worst that can happen is he gets the same results.

To be clear, I'm not by any means saying this is where everyone who's pessimistic about Milliman and the program's trajectory is coming from. But it'd take a lot at this point to convince me that the dynamic I'm describing isn't out there to some extent.

Wow. The brilliance of your analysis is overwhelming. Do you have any evidence for any of your bizarre psychological speculation?

[Wood Sticks 4ever]

Had Hopkins not let the coach go this years team would be better than what we have now. Next year’s team as well. Players left and recruits decommitted. Add back those players snd it becomes a different team.

I agree we would have won more this year and (likely) next year too. But here is the thing: we shouldn't be discussing whether 8-6 is better than 6-8.

The new staff is installing a new system and for a few years there will be a mismatch between player talents and system requirements. We will likely suck. But over the past ten years we have never had fewer than 5 losses and no final fours. Put another way, our ceiling is the NCAA quarter finals. Ten years of underperforming tells me that break that ceiling, you have to blow things up and that is what we are seeing.

I have no doubt JHU will eventually break thru, I'm just hoping it is in my lifetime

Uh, we were in the Final Four in 2015.

DocBarrister

You are right - I misstated a fact.

In 2015, they were 11-7. Are you seriously implying an 11-7 team invalidates my argument or are you just being snarky?

[Homer]

Wow. The brilliance of your analysis is overwhelming. Do you have any evidence for any of your bizarre psychological speculation?

Nope. Which is to say, just about exactly as much evidence as I've seen for the speculation that the Hopkins administration is actively trying to cause the program to fail. Or, alternatively, for the speculation that the current results are such an unmitigated disaster that the coaches' heads must already be on the chopping block.

I don't know, man. I apologize if my post was a bit unfair. Maybe I shouldn't have framed it as specifically about Hopkins *fans*, it's more just that I find the way people (on here and elsewhere) think and talk about Hopkins lacrosse sort of ... weird. I'm not going to go trawling for examples right now, but I think you could find posts that have exactly this duality: it's unreasonable to think Hopkins can be any better than a .500 team going forward, so they shouldn't have fired Petro; and also Milliman hasn't made them any better than basically a .500 team, so that proves Milliman is a clown.

I'm not saying people don't have a right to prefer one guy to another, or that there might not be some legitimate grudges about the way the transition's been handled. But what sometimes seems oddly lacking to me in some people's takes is any sense of *wanting* the program to do better and to make whatever changes are necessary to accomplish that. And that, among other things, leads me to wonder if that's not ultimately what their interest in the program is about. But -- like you said -- all just speculation, bizarre or not.

[HopFan16]

There's a reason most of PM's public alumni support to date has come from guys who graduated/played in the 70s and 90s (aka guys with less of a personal connection to Petro). I think Petro friends/allies don't want to be seen as supporting the guy who replaced him. They're more loyal to the man than to the school, which is completely their prerogative, but that doesn't mean everyone has to feel that way. I went to JHU during the Petro era and he was the only Hopkins lacrosse coach I've ever known but I am 100% willing to give the new staff the chance they deserve. If they haven't made progress after a few more years then I'll be perfectly ready and willing to embrace the next guy. BTW, over the weekend I talked to a couple lax alums with whom I overlapped at Hopkins. My impression was that the animus toward Baker/Daniels/the guys they hired is real but not necessary as pervasive as some would have you believe. It's one of those things where the critics are always going to be louder than the supporters — and certainly louder than the ones who are generally ambivalent, like the two guys I talked to. They were by no means Daniels lovers but they also didn't blame him for the program's downturn and believe it's possible for it to rise again. But that's not a provocative stance to blast out on social media or talk about at alumni breakfasts. I saw B. Carc at the tailgate btw along with probably about 15 guys who played under Petro. Didn't immediately recognize anyone else but I also don't know what a lot of the old timers look like. I know Gags has been vocal for his support of the program since the Petro ouster.

[Homer]

Why is it either/or? Why can't it be both some of A and some of B: 1) the growth of lax across the country has changed the sport making big time sports schools and easy academic/admit schools (e.g., Jax) attractive to top high school lax players, and, 2) we made bad choices, with early recruiting being a prime example.

I'm certainly not opposed to saying that times change, or that some of the choices I'd consider bad were themselves aimed at responding to the changes. I don't care for the corollary that sometimes gets added where we act like Scott and Chic and Zim were just playing on easy mode. Yeah, there were fewer teams back then -- so what -- you still had to win the games. But I'm perfectly fine with the general notion that in various ways it's objectively harder to win at Hopkins today than it used to be.

My criticism is that the specific narrative that's being put forward here does not make sense. It seems to me the "growth of the game" has significantly decelerated over the last decade, and arguably hasn't had as much effect on the sport's hierarchy as it was once widely assumed it would. But we can agree that it's a real thing that's probably affected different programs in different ways. That said:

1. It's not clear to me why the growth of lax would result in "big time sports schools" and "easy academic/admit schools" becoming more attractive to recruits, as opposed to any other conceivable category of schools.

2. Even if I did understand the connection there in theory, it's not clear to me that those two categories of schools are, as a group, performing better than they did in the past. You could probably engineer a wide range of results by fiddling with how you define the terms, but it's not a trend that jumps out at me from the data. Or, if it's there, it's dwarfed by the giant asterisk that has to be added where we say the Ivies are essentially the polar opposite of what we just described, and are having totally opposite results from what the theory would predict, but that's for special Ivy-related reasons that don't apply to anybody else.

3. Even if it were true that big-time sports schools and easy academic schools were gaining big advantages and dominating the field, it's not clear to me why that would be a problem for Hopkins in particular, as opposed to uniformly impacting all programs that aren't big-time sports schools or easy academic schools.

4. Even if it were the case that those types of schools' dominance represented a new and uniquely Hopkins-specific challenge, it's not clear to me that that challenge is best addressed by retaining a coaching staff that wasn't hired to deal with that problem and may not have any particularly coherent plan for dealing with it, nor that the program's capacity to adjust to the change is limited to however well that staff happened to do.

[a fan]

Why is it either/or? Why can't it be both some of A and some of B: 1) the growth of lax across the country has changed the sport making big time sports schools and easy academic/admit schools (e.g., Jax) attractive to top high school lax players, and, 2) we made bad choices, with early recruiting being a prime example.

I'm certainly not opposed to saying that times change, or that some of the choices I'd consider bad were themselves aimed at responding to the changes. I don't care for the corollary that sometimes gets added where we act like Scott and Chic and Zim were just playing on easy mode. Yeah, there were fewer teams back then -- so what -- you still had to win the games. But I'm perfectly fine with the general notion that in various ways it's objectively harder to win at Hopkins today than it used to be.

My criticism is that the specific narrative that's being put forward here does not make sense. It seems to me the "growth of the game" has significantly decelerated over the last decade, and arguably hasn't had as much effect on the sport's hierarchy as it was once widely assumed it would. But we can agree that it's a real thing that's probably affected different programs in different ways. That said:

1. It's not clear to me why the growth of lax would result in "big time sports schools" and "easy academic/admit schools" becoming more attractive to recruits, as opposed to any other conceivable category of schools.

Scholarships? I think we forget how few schools were fully funded in the 80's. How many more of those 12.6 scholarships are available in 2022 versus just 2000, let alone 1980? I was reminded of this when Hobart fans told me that just now Hobart can offer scholarships...they've been competing in D1 without them all this time. I had NO idea.

Just a thought.

[willowglen]

There is a different mindset than when I competed at the Division 1 level. Transferring - and yes one had to sit out a year and perhaps even more if staying in conference - was relatively unthinkable if an athlete was at a top school like JHU. Going from Hopkins to Maryland? Unthinkable in a sport not football or basketball. Athletes may have had a thumb on the scale in terms of admission but they by and large are smart. The value of JHU in terms of education is not the prestige of the school or the curriculum - although obviously very positive - the real value is upping your academic game by being exposed to rigor and high level competition. When you are in it you know it - and coming through it gives all sorts of confidence you can’t put a number on. I must sound like a dinosaur, but this factor in some way still must be relevant. The current coaching staff has to be selling this, especially with a Cornell background.

[Homer]

1. It's not clear to me why the growth of lax would result in "big time sports schools" and "easy academic/admit schools" becoming more attractive to recruits, as opposed to any other conceivable category of schools.

Scholarships? I think we forget how few schools were fully funded in the 80's. How many more of those 12.6 scholarships are available in 2022 versus just 2000, let alone 1980? I was reminded of this when Hobart fans told me that just now Hobart can offer scholarships...they've been competing in D1 without them all this time. I had NO idea.

Just a thought.

I agree that getting to fully funded has helped level the playing field for some programs. But wouldn't "big-time sports schools" be the ones more likely to have been fully funded from the beginning? I know that's probably not universally true -- maybe someone knows the details and can set me straight -- but just as a generalization it seems like the spread of fully funded programs would tend to look more like the big-time sports schools losing a recruiting advantage than gaining one.

I'm not sure exactly who the easy academic schools are -- probably unwise to go down that rabbit hole -- but I'm guessing they're mainly some combination of regional public schools that are relatively affordable for in-staters and private schools that give out a ton of merit aid that a good number of players could probably realistically qualify for. I'm sure 12.6 is always a nice club to have in the bag, but again I don't see why we'd think this category of schools is where it'd make the most difference.

If I had to guess I'd say the place where 12.6 is probably most a game-changer is somewhere like Villanova: expensive school, no Ivy-like deep pockets for need-based aid, what merit scholarships are available are probably out of reach for most recruited athletes. Will probably be good for Hobart too. But not really aligned with the theory we're discussing here, IMO.

[CU77]

It seems to me the "growth of the game" has significantly decelerated over the last decade, and arguably hasn't had as much effect on the sport's hierarchy as it was once widely assumed it would.

I just want to point out that in the past decade there have been five newcomers to the Final Four: Brown, Denver, Ohio State, Penn State, and Yale. This spreading of talent makes it harder for any team to have consistent high-level success.

[Big Dog]

There is a different mindset than when I competed at the Division 1 level. Transferring - and yes one had to sit out a year and perhaps even more if staying in conference - was relatively unthinkable if an athlete was at a top school like JHU. Going from Hopkins to Maryland? Unthinkable in a sport not football or basketball. Athletes may have had a thumb on the scale in terms of admission but they by and large are smart. The value of JHU in terms of education is not the prestige of the school or the curriculum - although obviously very positive - the real value is upping your academic game by being exposed to rigor and high level competition. When you are in it you know it - and coming through it gives all sorts of confidence you can’t put a number on. I must sound like a dinosaur, but this factor in some way still must be relevant. The current coaching staff has to be selling this, especially with a Cornell background.

Perhaps for "some" is in the handfuls. (And for those kids, there are still a handful of other schools that have the academic chops of Hopkins, such as Duke and the Ivies, and Notre Dame. And then there are the top publics, such as Michigan and UVa, with Carolina not far behind.

That said, I'm skeptical. Living in CA, I watch a fair amount of Pac12 sports, and one analyst, Mike Montgomery, former basketball Coach at Stanford and Cal, said that when he talks to coaches, not one says that students are asking about academics (at least for basketball). Monty said that is much different than when he was coaching at Stanford, when it was easy to convince the top academic basketball players to move to Palo Alto.

OTOH, perhaps lax athletes are different than basketballers.

[DocBarrister]

Had Hopkins not let the coach go this years team would be better than what we have now. Next year’s team as well. Players left and recruits decommitted. Add back those players snd it becomes a different team.

I agree we would have won more this year and (likely) next year too. But here is the thing: we shouldn't be discussing whether 8-6 is better than 6-8.

The new staff is installing a new system and for a few years there will be a mismatch between player talents and system requirements. We will likely suck. But over the past ten years we have never had fewer than 5 losses and no final fours. Put another way, our ceiling is the NCAA quarter finals. Ten years of underperforming tells me that break that ceiling, you have to blow things up and that is what we are seeing.

I have no doubt JHU will eventually break thru, I'm just hoping it is in my lifetime

Uh, we were in the Final Four in 2015.

DocBarrister

You are right - I misstated a fact.

In 2015, they were 11-7. Are you seriously implying an 11-7 team invalidates my argument or are you just being snarky?

Not at all.

A Final Four team is a Final Four team, no matter what their final record.

I recall the 2007 Hopkins team was criticized for having four (!!!) losses. Didn’t matter … by the end of the season, that Hopkins team was the best in the nation and the official national champions of college lacrosse.

DocBarrister

[DALaxDad]

It seems to me the "growth of the game" has significantly decelerated over the last decade, and arguably hasn't had as much effect on the sport's hierarchy as it was once widely assumed it would.

I just want to point out that in the past decade there have been five newcomers to the Final Four: Brown, Denver, Ohio State, Penn State, and Yale. This spreading of talent makes it harder for any team to have consistent high-level success.

CU I agree with your point but both Yale and Brown were in the final 4 in the 1990s.

[DocBarrister]

There is a different mindset than when I competed at the Division 1 level. Transferring - and yes one had to sit out a year and perhaps even more if staying in conference - was relatively unthinkable if an athlete was at a top school like JHU. Going from Hopkins to Maryland? Unthinkable in a sport not football or basketball. Athletes may have had a thumb on the scale in terms of admission but they by and large are smart. The value of JHU in terms of education is not the prestige of the school or the curriculum - although obviously very positive - the real value is upping your academic game by being exposed to rigor and high level competition. When you are in it you know it - and coming through it gives all sorts of confidence you can’t put a number on. I must sound like a dinosaur, but this factor in some way still must be relevant. The current coaching staff has to be selling this, especially with a Cornell background.

Great post. Thank you.

DocBarrister

[DocBarrister]

There is probably a way to monetize and profit from college lacrosse, to a much greater degree than anything being done today.

DocBarrister

Yeah. My original idea was that you could have a tax-advantaged entity offer a service to individuals who agree to "be on the lacrosse team" in exchange for a nominal discount to a sticker price that can be set at an arbitrarily high level each year in order to subsidize the actual price paid by regular people, only the very fact of getting a de minimis discount labeled "athletic scholarship" turns out to be weirdly prestigious for parents to talk about at Fairfield County cocktail parties and highly sought after, so much so that in order to get it people will commit to what amounts to a full-time job with a high risk of physical injury but no worker's comp or other standard employment protections.

But on second thought, there's probably a more lucrative model out there. I just don't think it'll have anything to do with expecting people to watch the product.

There was a recent article on Major League Baseball. Apparently, MLB still takes in huge amounts of money from selling broadcasting rights. However, the ratings are terrible on the cable and streaming chanels. But ratings are not where the profitability comes from … instead, it’s the mandatory bundling of those MLB games as filler with other products that people actually watch.

In other words, people may only want to watch content A, B, and C, but the bundler also requires them to buy unpopular D, E, and F if they want the popular three. That’s where MLB games are—D, E, and F, which few people (except mostly old geezers) watch.

College lacrosse can be bundled the same way. You want college basketball and college football? You’ll need to pay for college lacrosse, college bowling, and college softball as well. Just a hypothetical example.

DocBarrister

[44WeWantMore]

There is a different mindset than when I competed at the Division 1 level. Transferring - and yes one had to sit out a year and perhaps even more if staying in conference - was relatively unthinkable if an athlete was at a top school like JHU. Going from Hopkins to Maryland? Unthinkable in a sport not football or basketball. Athletes may have had a thumb on the scale in terms of admission but they by and large are smart. The value of JHU in terms of education is not the prestige of the school or the curriculum - although obviously very positive - the real value is upping your academic game by being exposed to rigor and high level competition. When you are in it you know it - and coming through it gives all sorts of confidence you can’t put a number on. I must sound like a dinosaur, but this factor in some way still must be relevant. The current coaching staff has to be selling this, especially with a Cornell background.

Perhaps for "some" is in the handfuls. (And for those kids, there are still a handful of other schools that have the academic chops of Hopkins, such as Duke and the Ivies, and Notre Dame. And then there are the top publics, such as Michigan and UVa, with Carolina not far behind.

That said, I'm skeptical. Living in CA, I watch a fair amount of Pac12 sports, and one analyst, Mike Montgomery, former basketball Coach at Stanford and Cal, said that when he talks to coaches, not one says that students are asking about academics (at least for basketball). Monty said that is much different than when he was coaching at Stanford, when it was easy to convince the top academic basketball players to move to Palo Alto.

OTOH, perhaps lax athletes are different than basketballers.

Not very different back in the day. Sure, Chic could reach pretty far down a Baltimore prep school for a can't miss lacrosse player, while basketballers got little admissions support, but once there, I think they were treated about the same academically. I think the difference was more that a basketballer would find it a lot easier to tell his coach that he had to miss practice for a lab than a lax player would, so you would find more STEM majors on the court than the field.

I suspect little has changed.

[jhu06]

I do not enjoy watching Hopkins lose 51. you are right you can't switch out 58 guys plus 2 classes of commits in 2 years. But there's also enough talent in that building to beat delaware, navy at home, and compete w/maryland as they did in taking care of towson loyola jacksonville and gait u.

the program alumni have no reason not to support pm or the program. In fact you'd think the younger guys would be rallying around folks like dyer jameson and current players who they presumably have personal connections to through coaches friends family and others. The fact that hawley chose to stay and play and supports PM should've been a message to whatever concerns ex players, alumni, parents, wags, and others have about the character the kids see in him and his staff.

QK and Carc have taken turns for the last few years bashing daniels and baker on their various lm, il, espn, baltimoresun and whatever the blog qk writes now. Both work for a company in espn that the university has a contract with and are either program alumni or a sibling of one. Notre Dame has a partnership w/nbc and if drew brees and tirico or whomever does the notre dame games were laying into sawbrick or notre dame leadership the way qk and carc and anish have there would be calls from south bend to nbc sports. Hopkins has a massive pr operation and is marylands largest employer after the state. If they wanted to quash the narratives that qk and carc have put out about the lack of support from daniels and baker hurting the program the school would've done so. From the outside as 51 has pointed out it's harder to see what support the program hasn't gotten and it's especially hard to understand how the advantages the program does have haven't translated into more winning.

[ColumbiaBlueBlack]

I know for a fact it was suppose to be before the game. Changed to afterwards ( for whatever reason?? ) night before.

Not changed the night before.

[masondixonlax]

Anyone thinking there is going to be mass exodus of Hopkins lacrosse players through the transfer portal this summer?

[DocBarrister]

Anyone thinking there is going to be mass exodus of Hopkins lacrosse players through the transfer portal this summer?

What would you consider a “mass exodus?”

DocBarrister