A Different Selection Sunday

• TWEET
• SHARE
• SHARE

Seven weeks ago I wrote about (M. Hoops)  Selection Sunday and how awesome it is. Well today's another Selection Sunday, albeit one with significantly less hype: Both the men's and women's lacrosse NCAA Tournament brackets will be revealed this evening.

On the men's side, it looks like Ivy League will have three teams, as Inside Lacrosse predicts Princeton will get the four seed, Cornell the eight, and Brown will face No. 7 Notre Dame. The official bracket will be released at 9 p.m. on ESPNU.

(For those that don't know, the men's and women's tournament don't seed all 16 teams. Instead, the top eight are seeded and then the rest are normally paired up based on convenience of travel, as the NCAA tries to limit teams that must fly to games in the first two rounds.)

But of course the more important bracket for Penn is the women's one (in fact, for the last two years this Selection Sunday has been more relevant to the University than the March Madness version).  The bracket will be released on CBS College Sports at 10 p.m. For those of you that don't get CBS College Sports (which I assume is most of you), tonight around 9:45 or so I'll have a live blog detailing the Selection Show. But as for now, join me after the jump for some predictions on what seed Penn will get.

Clearly Penn's loss to Stanford yesterday hurt the team's tournament profile. But how much damage did it really do? 

Northwestern and Maryland are both 19-0 and ranked No. 1 and No. 2, respectively. Those two have all but clinched the top two seeds, so it's very unlikely a Quakers win over No. 13 Stanford would've pushed them up to the one or two line. Instead, Penn is one of just two two-loss teams in the country; Fairfield is the other one, but its strength of schedule is 65 (Penn's is 13). So theoretically the Quakers are the third-best team in America. And looking at this week's coaches poll, the coaches agreed, despite Penn losing the previous week to Northwestern.

Meanwhile, there are two teams that are battling Penn for the three seed. Five-loss Duke received 20 fewer points than Penn and was fourth in the coaches poll. Right behind them was North Carolina who only has four losses. However, since then Penn has lost to the Cardinal while the Blue Devils trounced No. 16 Dartmouth, 22-8, today. UNC has finished its regular season, which was actually the toughest in America as measured by SOS. So the $64,000 question is can the Blue Devils or Tar Heels leap frog Penn?  

There is precedent for Penn getting jumped over when the seeds come out.  Two years ago Penn received the four seed despite ending the season ranked second in the coaches poll. In addition, last year Penn beat Northwestern, who had previously been undefeated, late in the season. But despite going into the selection show first in the coaches poll, Penn fell to the two seed behind the Wildcats.  As for this year, in its latest power rankings, updated before the Duke-Dartmouth game, Lax Power has Penn slightly behind Duke (94.47 versus 93.41), though UNC is far behind at nine.

With all of this said, it appears that Penn will still get the three seed. UNC did have a tougher schedule and has more quality wins (it's beaten Duke, No. 8 Georgetown, No. 10 Virginia, Stanford, No. 14 Ohio State, No. 15 Penn State and No. 18 Old Dominion, while the Quakers have beaten No. 7 Princeton, No. 12 Boston University, Penn State, No. 16 Dartmouth and No. 19 Cornell). However, it'll be really hard for the Selection Committee to give Penn a worse seed than UNC, which the Quakers beat 11-2. Duke, meanwhile, has only a slightly better SOS than Penn (11), yet had fewer quality wins: the Blue Devils also beat Princeton and North Carolina in addition to Virginia, No. 11 Vanderbilt and now Dartmouth.  Finally, in its women's bracketology Inside Lacrosse still gives Penn the No. 3 seed.

In the end, does it matter who gets the three seed? The top four seeds are guaranteed home games in rounds one and two before the predetermined Final Four takes place in Towson, Md. So either the Tar Heels, Blue Devils or Quakers will have to travel in round two if the seeds hold up. But more importantly, the three seed would avoid Northwestern in the semifinals, and right now, no one wants to play the Wildcats. That said, it's not like the Terrapins are slouches, so maybe it doesn't matter. But that's the beauty of Selection Sunday, regardless of what sport it is. There are always arguments about seeding, even if in the end it only matters what the Committee decides.