The Crease Dive's NCAA Lacrosse Tournament First Round Recap
8 teams. 7 games. 2 weekends.
That’s all that we have left of the 2019 NCAA lacrosse season. Penn State, Duke, Virginia, Penn, Yale, Notre Dame, Loyola and Maryland all have the chance to make the trip to Philly for Memorial Day Weekend. And personally I don’t think that you could have drawn up a better group of matchups for the quarterfinals. First up on Saturday we’ll have an old school ACC matchup between Maryland and Virginia. Then we’ll have a rematch of the 2010 National Championship between Notre Dame and Duke. Then on Sunday we’ll get Grant Ament vs Pat Spencer as Penn State and Loyola get it going at noon. And finally we’ll wrap things up with the final part of the trilogy between Penn and Yale this season, with Penn trying to beat Yale for the 3rd straight time.
Obviously this upcoming weekend is about to be ridiculous but before we start talking about the quarterfinals, let’s talk about how we got here. Earlier today we recorded our full First Round Recap episode of The Crease Dive so if you want all of the takes, you can give it a listen.
Download/subscribe/listen to today’s episode of The Crease Dive on iTunes here:
And for the Android crowd, you can listen to today’s episode of The Crease Dive on SoundCloud here:
But for the more visual learners in the building, I’ll just drop a few first round highlights in the blog.
Loyola 15 – Syracuse 13
Saturday at noon had the potential to be the final game in Pat Spencer’s college lacrosse career. And for a little while there it was starting to look like that might be the case. But then Pat Spencer remembered that he was Pat Spencer and that he has the ability to do whatever he wants out there on the lacrosse field. 3 goals and 6 assists on the day for Spencer. And even though the 9 points were dominant enough, it’s the way he got those 9 points. He was just bigger, faster, stronger and better than anybody else out there on that field. You can see it in the two clips that you’ve seen from him in this blog already. He was being guarded by Nick Mellen all day. Mellen is a 2nd team All-American who you could make the case that he should have deserved 1st team honors. Either way he was one of the best defensemen left in the tournament and Spencer completely bullied the kid.
And in the process, Pat Spencer became the 2nd all time leading point scorer in NCAA lacrosse history, as well as the all time assist leader in NCAA lacrosse history. Pretty casual day for #7, and it was a huge sigh of relief from the lacrosse world that we get to watch him play for at least another week here.
Yale 19 – Georgetown 16
This game had all the makings of a good ol’ fashion shit pumping early on. Yale got out to a 7-0 lead just 7 minutes into the game and I’m pretty sure Georgetown had only touched the ball like twice during that run. It must be pretty much when you’ve got an absolute weapon like TD Ierlan winning 31 faceoffs on the day, and getting his 1000th career win (keep in mind he still has another full year left to play). But after a while, Georgetown started to show a little life which was awesome considering I was the fucking idiot who predicted that they’d get the upset win.
That right there is Dan Bucaro taking Chris Fake out to the woodshed. Unfortunately for Georgetown, though, the defending champs kept winning every goddamn faceoff and the Hoyas could never get a serious run going. So even though the game ended a lot closer than it started, Yale was always in control of this one. And now they’ll have a chance to try to beat Penn for the first time this season. That’s because…
Penn 13 – Army 8
Penn hates the Troops. I mean they were full blown disrespecting the Troops out there. Not even one single “thank you for your service”.
I already talked about Pat Spencer winning his matchup against Nick Mellen. But how about Simon Mathias owning his matchup against Johnny Surdick? Surdick is a first team All-American and was the first pole drafted to the PLL. He’s an absolute monster and Simon Mathias–not necessarily a household name in college lacrosse–took him to school. And that’s the thing that is so scary about this Penn team. They’ve got so many different options to go to offensively. They have 9 different players who have double digit goals this year. They are scary deep and even one of the more intimidating defenses in Army couldn’t stop them. One more win against Yale now and they’ll have a home game set up for Memorial Day Weekend.
Virginia 19 – Robert Morris 10
Similar to Penn, Virginia is just so damn deep offensively. Matt Moore had 9 points on the night with 2 goals and 7 assists. Mikey Herring had 6 goals. Ryan Conrad had 5 goals. Dox Aitken only had 2 goals and Virginia was able to put up 19 on the night. And it could have been a lot more but I think Lars Tiffany called off the dogs a little earlier than he needed to. The final score here showed that it was a 9-goal game but to be perfectly honest, even that is a lot closer than it felt like.
Penn State 25 – UMBC 10
From one dick kicking straight to another, Penn State showed why they are the most lethal offense in the nation yesterday afternoon. The fact that UMBC was even allowed on the same field as them yesterday seemed a little disrespectful. Just like Penn, Penn State also has 9 players who have scored double digit goals this year. Even more impressive than that–they have 6 players who all have at least 25 goals on the year, with Mac O’Keefe leading the way at 66. It’s just flat out silly how good this team is and a 25-10 score could have easily been 30-10 if Tambroni didn’t want to get the 2nd unit a little more work. Shit pumping like you read about.
Maryland 14 – Towson 13 (OT)
So not only was this the only overtime game of the weekend, but it was also the only game where the home team lost. It’s hard to call Maryland beating Towson an “upset” considering I think Maryland had been the better team all year long. But in terms of seeding and the fact that they were on the road? Sure, it was an upset.
Now I don’t want to make this win too much about myself but I do need to give a huge shoutout here to Kyle Long. The freshman for Maryland had the game winning assist in overtime which was right after he had the game tying assist with under 20 seconds left in regulation.
1 goal and 4 assists on the day for the freshman who comes to Maryland out of Springfield, PA. Where he was coached for the last 4 years by none other than Barstool Jordie. Am I saying that the only reason why Maryland has a chance to go back to their 6th straight final four appearance is because I taught the kid everything he knows? Not exactly. But I wouldn’t hate if other people started saying that for me.
Duke 12 – Richmond 11
I’ll be honest–this game didn’t do too much for me. I knew that it was going to be a tight game since the first time these two teams played this season was a 1-goal game heading into the 4th quarter. But nothing in this game really stood out to me besides the fact that Nakeie Montgomery is an absolute beast in the month of May. I’m just glad that Duke was able to hold off that final little Richmond run there at the end of the game because Duke vs Notre Dame in the quarterfinals is infinitely better than Notre Dame vs Richmond.
Notre Dame 16 – Johns Hopkins 9
Ryder. Garnsey. Is. Back.
After all the speculation heading into the game, it actually happened. Ryder Garnsey was academically ineligible for the spring ’19 semester. But after his finals wrapped up on Friday, he was good to go for the Sunday night game. So what did he go out there and do in his season debut? Oh ya know, just a casual 4 point night and also tucked home one of the filthiest goals of the year with that dive.
It’s obvious that Garnsey is a difference maker out there for Notre Dame. They are a team that is incredibly fundamental and strategic. And then you have Ryder Garnsey. He just adds an element of “what the fuck is going on here” to this team offensively and just in general. So credit to him for coming out on fire like that, and credit to the entire Notre Dame team for being able to make that adjustment work seamlessly. Also–I feel terrible for all those people out there who were crying about High Point not getting into the tournament. Because that showing from Hopkins last night had to have been a dagger to those folk. Not that I think High Point would have beat Notre Dame or anything, but they could have just as easily lost 16-9.
So yeah. That was everything you may have missed from the first round of the 2019 NCAA Men’s DI Lacrosse Tournament. We’ll be back later this week with our quarterfinals preview.
***DOWNLOAD AND SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES HERE***
FOLLOW US ON TWITTER AND INSTAGRAM: @thecreasedive