Strength of Schedule Makes Men out of Boys

Unlike the men’s basketball NCAA tournament, where only the Ivy League champion makes the field of 65, this season’s NCAA men’s soccer bracket featured three squads from the Ancient Eight. With three entrants in the field, including a Brown team that was ranked high enough to receive a first-round bye, 2007 looked to be the conference’s best shot at a run to the Final Four since the Princeton women’s side made the semi-finals in 2004. The closest any team from the Ancient Eight has come to a national title was the 1983 Columbia side that fell 1-0 to Indiana in double overtime in the championship game.

The 2007 dream would not last long.

Both Harvard and Dartmouth fell in the first round, followed shortly thereafter by Brown last weekend.

In all three games, the Ivy teams either fell in overtime or by just one goal. All the matches were well fought, but the losses raise serious questions on the merits of how many bids to the NCAA tournament the league received.

Now, I’m not one to usually criticize Ivy programs and I usually applaud the league when they succeed on a national level. But the Dartmouth women’s team that finished second in the Ivy League behind Columbia last year was wrongfully denied a shot at the NCAA tournament considering its strong non-conference record.

Going back to the situation facing the selection committee this year: all three of the teams that made the field were ranked in the top 25 in the last two weeks of the season. In most cases, that would be enough to get any team in the tournament, but a closer inspection of Dartmouth’s record could have provided an insight into how the team would fare in soccer’s Big Dance.

The Big Green had only played four games against top-25 opposition, two of which were against its Ivy counterparts, and produced a 1-2-1 record. The three contests that were not tied were all one-goal affairs, and it is that theme of one-goal contests that gives me pause. For Dartmouth, it didn’t matter if they were playing a bottom-of-the-pack team or a top-25 squad—the result was decided in all but three cases by a single goal.

The sign of any strong team is their ability to play up to their competition and handily defeat those teams that lack similar talent. Dartmouth was not dominant in their matches against teams like Columbia, Princeton, or Penn, and that puts its candidacy for an at-large bid in a different light.

There is a specific reason why mid-major teams that rack up large numbers of victories during a season do not make any NCAA tournament, whether it is in basketball or soccer—the majority of those wins came against significantly less polished programs. A team that plays well in major conferences like the Pac-10, Big-10, and Big East are most likely better prepared to face the kind of competition that makes the NCAAs.

Even if the major conference teams don’t have the number of victories as a team from the Ivy League, it is the quality of those victories that matters more. For the most part, Ancient Eight competition is nowhere near that of the major conferences and teams that have only marginally better talent inflate their records. In the case of the Big Green, a regular season record of 11-4-2 is impressive, but it is the level of competition that must be evaluated with more scrutiny. Against the seven teams that Dartmouth played in the regular season that made the NCAA tournament, the Big Green went 3-3-1 and also dropped a contest to an unranked New Hampshire team.

The burden of proof will always be higher for Ivy teams than major conference teams, and rightfully so. Given the results in the first two rounds of the tournament, it does not seem that burden was met. Let that be a lesson for all Ancient Eight supporters.