Some of you may know Francis as a blogger. Others of you may know him as a stand-up comedian. Others may know him as a radio host of Barstool Breakfast on Sirius XM. Others may know him for his videos and others may know him for attempting to take them on a romantic evening after stopping by the office. But what do I know Francis as? Well I know Francis as a lax rat and a lax rat only.

Which is why we brought him on this week’s episode of The Crease Dive to talk about his 4 years playing at Harvard and the journey he took to get there. And honestly–I think it was a helluva story. I’m not even just saying that because I’m trying to pimp the podcast. Francis’ recruitment story is exactly why more people need to play the game. You can use being a lacrosse player to your advantage and use the game to get you to schools that you otherwise not have been able to go to. Obviously not everybody is going to be good enough to be able to use lacrosse to get them into Harvard. But there are plenty of other schools out there who have scholarships to hand out and if you impress the right person at the right time, bang, you’re in. And then you can parlay that Harvard education into a job with Barstool Sports. So think about that. Without lacrosse, we may not have Francis. We also get into Harvard’s hot start to the season after their huge overtime win against BU earlier this week.

Listen to the full episode right here. Make sure to Subscribe, download, rate and listen.

Weekend Preview (March 23-25)

#2 Maryland vs #20 UNC | Saturday, 10pm

First of all, happy spring break to most of the squads in the nation. With it being spring break, the Terps will take on the Tar Heels in Cali for this game which explains the 10pm start. We’ve got the 2017 National Champions taking on the 2016 National Champions and in a perfect world, this game ends up being a blowout. I’ve said it quite a few times so far this season–I just don’t think UNC is very good. They have great players but they just seem to play about 30 minutes of lacrosse every game. Meanwhile, aside from dropping a 1-goal game to Albany, Maryland looks just as good as they did last year even with graduating that senior class.

With that being said, this looks like it could easily be one of those games that makes zero sense whatsoever and UNC comes out on top. Especially considering the game is at a neutral site all the way across the country. And even though I don’t think UNC is good this year, I still don’t think they’re bad enough to lose 4 straight games in a row. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this one come down to a late game goal for the win. But it’s going to take Connor Kelly doing Connor Kelly things, and the rest of the squad like Jared Bernhardt and Logan Wisnauskus for the Terps to survive the upset. I’m pretty interested in what Chris Cloutier has in store for us playing in Cali though. I think this is the perfect setting for him to really snap off.

#9 Hopkins @ #10 Virginia | Saturday, 11:30am | ESPNU

Quick history lesson for everybody here. Let’s take a look at the last 4 times Hopkins and UVA have played each other in the regular season.

• 2017: Hopkins beats UVA 18-17 in overtime
• 2016: UVA beats Hopkins 13-12 in overtime
• 2015: UVA beats Hopkins 16-15 in overtime
• 2014: UVA beats Hopkins 11-10 in overtime

Now there are a couple of tournament games in there as well which weren’t close games, but we’re talking regular season here. End of March between Hopkins and UVA means one thing and one thing only–60 minutes ain’t gonna cut it.

Right now Hopkins is on a nice little 4-game run after taking down Princeton, Syracuse, UMBC and Delaware. Virginia is still undefeated in out of conference play this year but as a quick reminder, they haven’t won an ACC game since 2014. That doesn’t matter at all for this game considering Hopkins is B1G, but yeah. This game is going to overtime and when you get to overtime, you need a few studs who you can rely on offensively to bring the clutch gene. My heart and my brain tells me that Hopkins has more of those kids on the field than UVA does. You can look to Cole Williams. You can look to Joel Tinney. You can look to Kyle Marr. You can look to Shack Stanwick. Virginia is just a little too young for me to be confident in them coming out of this one with an overtime win. Their top 5 point scorers are two sophomores, two freshmen and a senior. Give me the Blue Jays in this one but it’ll be tight.

Princeton @ #6 Yale | Saturday, 1pm | Ivy League Network

Last week it was Ben Reeves vs Jeff Teat in the battle of elite Ivy League attackmen. Ben Reeves made sure that everybody knows this conference still belongs to him after the Bulldogs pulled out a 13-11 win at Cornell. This weekend it’s going to be Ben Reeves vs Michael Sowers. I’ve said this plenty of times before but by his senior year, Michael Sowers is going to be the best player in the nation. He’s an unbelievable dodger. He’s got unbelievable vision. He always knows where the slides are going to come from and there’s not much you can do to stop him. But all the same things apply to Ben Reeves. So when you go with Reeves vs Sowers, that matchup is a wash. Then you have to look to the rest of the team and I think just as the case was last week in Yale vs Cornell, Yale is just a better overall team than Princeton this year so they’ll most likely come out on top. It was a 16-13 win for Yale last year, I’d expect it to be even tighter this year.

#4 Notre Dame @ Ohio State | Sunday, 12pm | ESPNU 

It’s always a great day for the sport when two big football schools go head-to-head. We had one of these earlier this week when Notre Dame hosted Michigan on Wednesday night. And for the first time in program history, Michigan got a win over a top 5 school.

Crazy mid-week upset that’ll definitely drop Notre Dame back a few spots in the rankings. But if I’m Ohio State, I want to kill that Michigan team right now because they just lit a fire under the Irish’s ass. If Notre Dame comes away unscathed from that game, then they head to Columbus at 5-1 with their only loss coming against the defending champs. They’d be feeling pretty confident in themselves and it would be the perfect scenario for Ohio State to catch them sleeping a bit. But now they’re going there pissed off after losing to an unranked team, and two losses in a week would drop them out of the top 10. Meanwhile Ohio State is coming off of back-to-back losses to Towson and Denver. Losing 3 in a row heading into Big Ten play wouldn’t exactly be an ideal scenario but that’s how I see this one playing out.

Other Good Games To Check Out This Weekend: 

• #15 Syracuse @ #3 Duke | Saturday, 1:30pm | ESPNU
• Towson @ #5 Denver | Saturday, 2pm

Jordie’s TCD Picks Of The Week (3-2 Last Week, 21-12-3 Overall)

So for the last few weeks, we’ve been straying away from picking ATS and have just been going with straight up winners instead. Primarily due to the reason that we have to record a little earlier in the week now before the lines are set. But what we’ll do from now on is give some straight up winners in the podcast and then I’ll go off of Lax Vegas Lines here in the weekend preview blog. Sound good? Good.

Anyway, last week my picks were…

• Albany over Vermont. The Dane Train steamrolled over the Catamounts. 
• Maryland over Villanova. The defending champs got some revenge over last year’s overtime loss. 
• Virginia over Notre Dame. The Cavs will still have to wait another couple of weeks until they can try to get their first ACC win in 4 years. 
• Yale over Cornell. Ben Reeves isn’t ready to hand over the Ivy League to Jeff Teat just yet. 
• And my Underdog of the Week was Navy over Loyola. To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t confident in that pick at all and especially not after Pat Spencer put up 12 points himself against the Midshipmen. 

For this week’s picks, I’m riding with…

• Hopkins over Virginia
• Yale -1.5 over Princeton
• UNC +4 against Maryland
• Notre Dame -2.5 over Ohio State
• My Mortal Lock of the Week is going to be Syracuse +3.5 against Duke. I think Duke comes out on top but this has 1-goal game written all over it.

As for the kid Robby O, well he went 3-2 last week which gives him back-to-back positive weekends after a tragic start to the season. This week he’s riding with Hopkins, Yale, UNC and Ohio State. Looks like he’ll be making some decent coin this weekend so make sure to throw him a follow on Twitter @R_Zetti.

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