Forget for a moment about Princeton and Johns Hopkins and Virginia.

The NCAA — or its Bracketing and Seeding Committee, to be exact — might prove the most significant obstacle between the Syracuse men’s lacrosse team and its 21st consecutive Final Four.

Last April, the NCAA approved expanding the tournament from 12 to 16 teams for this year, a move that many coaches, especially Syracuse’s John Desko, had long desired. The imperfection, however, lies in the reformatting.

Syracuse does not belong to a conference and must be awarded an at-large bid to the tournament. Last season, six conference champions qualified for the postseason by winning their leagues. Six more schools — including No. 2-seed Syracuse — received at-large bids.

This season, seven conferences — some still embryonic — will enjoy automatic qualifications (AQs). Independents like Syracuse — or teams in the ACC, which does not enjoy an AQ — can tolerate this, because the number of at-large bids will rise from six to nine.

The problem, though, is that college lacrosse is not college basketball. The NCAA will not allow for the field to be seeded No. 1 through No. 16, with No. 1 playing No. 16, No. 2 vs. No. 15 and so on. The Bracketing and Seeding Committee, in a Feb. 12 ruling, decided that only the top four teams will be seeded. First-round matchups to be played on campus will be determined by the geographic proximity of the two teams.

Syracuse conceivably could host a Cornell team seeded as high as No. 5 or low as No. 16 if no other tournament team is located within driving distance, roughly defined by the NCAA as 400 miles.

‘Those concerns are out there right now,’ said Chappy Menninger, chairman of the Division I men’s lacrosse committee.

Presume, for argument’s sake, that the top four seeds this May mirror last May: No. 1 Johns Hopkins, No. 2 Syracuse, No. 3 Virginia and No. 4 Princeton. A year ago, all four received first-round byes. Seed Nos. 5 through 8 won their first-round games versus teams that qualified by winning weak conferences. In the second round, the top four seeds all won. The favorites advanced to the Final Four. In short, the system worked.

‘We’ve seeded eight teams in a 12-team field,’ said Desko, ‘and now we’ve gone to 16 teams and unseeded four. I hoped we could avoid this.’

Desko is a member of the five-person men’s lacrosse committee — along with Princeton coach Bill Tierney, Duke coach Mike Pressler, Butler Associate Athletics Director John Hind and Menninger, the athletics director at Mount St. Mary’s in Maryland. Together, they will select and seed the 16 teams. None will enjoy first-round byes. The only promise guaranteed the top four is that they will not meet until the Final Four.

‘The people who are real nervous,’ Virginia coach Dom Starsia said, ‘are those who are close (geographically) to each other, like Cornell and Syracuse or North Carolina and Duke. I do think the adoption of AQs and tournament expansion are wonderful developments for the game. But I have grave concerns about seeding the tournament if we can’t get beyond the top four teams seeded.’

The reason for this is, of course, money — the NCAA reimburses teams for transportation and pays a per diem during the postseason — and travel, especially post-Sept. 11.

Starsia, probably more than Desko, has reason to be concerned. The Orangemen, presuming they finish in the top four, should draw a fair first-round opponent. In the current scenario, applied to last year’s postseason participants, Syracuse would draw favorably, either Manhattan or Stony Brook.

‘Our concern is that in the South, where Duke and North Carolina and Virginia are such close neighbors, how do we avoid each other in the first round?’ Starsia said. ‘We could be seeded No. 1 and 5, and it is not out of the realm of imagination that we could play each other. That would be a shame. It would be unfortunate if financial concerns were the primary basis for matchups.’

This particular scenario is unlikely, Menninger said, because the lacrosse committee will only as a last resort match up teams from the same conference in the opening round. (Virginia, Maryland, Duke and North Carolina make up the ACC.)

Despite the controversy, do not blame the system on the men’s lacrosse committee, which until recently believed it would be able to seed eight teams this year. That would make No. 1 vs. No. 9 the worst-case scenario.

‘We were thrown a curveball by the Bracketing and Seeding Committee,’ said Menninger, who became committee chair in September. ‘We thought it would be eight. Low and behold, we thought the bracketing committee had passed it. However, it won’t be effective until 2004.’

If then. For eight teams to be seeded in 2004, the measure must receive the seal of the NCAA President’s Council. Then, the men’s lacrosse committee must demonstrate in September that seeding eight teams will not incur additional expenses.

‘This has been advanced to 2004,’ Menninger said, ‘and even then it is not a go unless we can show that it is a cost-effective procedure to seed 50 percent.’

‘The committee,’ Starsia pointed out, ‘almost has to do all the work of laying out two fields to have it approved.’

What the NCAA decides may depend upon this spring’s tournament bracket — and the praise or disgust that follows.

Either way, the benefits of expansion should not be overshadowed. Of the top nine teams in the Inside Lacrosse/Face-Off Yearbook preseason coaches’ poll, six are not eligible for AQs because they are independents or members of the four-team ACC.

A year ago, subpar performances by teams that reached the postseason by AQs magnified the need for a 16-team field. Cornell pounded Stony Brook, 12-3, in the opening round, while Duke lit up Hobart, 22-6. Maryland, meanwhile, lost four games, all by one goal — to Duke twice, Virginia and Johns Hopkins — and stayed home.

‘Nobody wanted to play Maryland, and they didn’t even make it,’ Tierney said.

Hofstra and Loyola were similarly and undeservedly left out.

‘We were absolutely splitting hairs last year,’ Menninger said. ‘There will always be teams that don’t make it, but those were real tricky.’

The challenge this year for the committee will come in an Indianapolis office the first week of May when it selects and seeds the 16 teams.

‘I would venture that they will seed the entire bracket one through 16, see how that looks with the NCAA policy and then tweak it,’ said Phil Buttafuoco, the ECAC commissioner who chaired the men’s lacrosse committee last year. ‘In essence, the committee is not given a budget to work with but is told to be fiscally responsible and minimize the number of flights. If you take the policy strictly by the way it is written, certainly there are some challenges to it, but this is an opportunity for the committee to be creative.’

Despite undeniable concern, if Syracuse is to complain, its cries will likely fall on unwilling ears. The Orangemen have appeared in four consecutive championship games, winning two. They, along with Towson, host the tournament quarterfinals, meaning that the road to yet another Final Four, this one at the Baltimore Ravens’ home stadium, would go through the Carrier Dome.

‘The chances of an upset at Syracuse in the Dome, I don’t sense that will happen,’ Tierney said. ‘Especially this year with them having the quarterfinals there, you kind of write the ticket for them to Ravens Stadium.’

Published on February 25, 2003 at 12:00 pm