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Exclusives: From the Cheap Seats May
16, 2001: By Matt Golden '94 On April 28, the Princeton men's lacrosse team clinched the Ivy League championship with a 19-2 throttling of Dartmouth. It was the seventh straight Ivy crown for the Tigers and their 37th consecutive win in league play. Impressive stuff, but was the title ever in doubt? Not really. The championship was a foregone conclusion. The Tigers stand head and shoulders above the rest of the Ivies when it comes to men's lacrosse. Princeton is ranked number one in the nation and should coast all the way to the NCAA Final Four. Over the course of a season, prohibitive favorites, like the Tigers, usually distance themselves from the competition. That's certainly a fair way to determine the league champion, but it's not very exciting. And it even takes some of the luster off the Ivy crown. Beating Dartmouth was just another step on the road to a hotly anticipated national championship rematch with Syracuse - the Tigers lost to Syracuse earlier this season and in last year's title game. If you want excitement, then you need to ante up and play a hand of winner-take-all. And that is precisely what the Ivy League has done with its baseball championship. In 1993 the league established two four-team divisions, the Gehrig and the Rolfe (named for Columbia grad and Yankee great Lou Gehrig and Dartmouth's Red Rolfe), and established a format that called for the division winners to meet in a weekend series for the Ivy title - two days, three games, and one champion. Whoever emerges from the best-of-three showdown gets the title and an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. The format is perfect - at least for baseball. Allowing only the division winners to participate in the championship series maintains the integrity of the regular season. And the new Ivy schedule calls for each team to play four games against divisional rivals - two versus teams from the other division. That gives weight to intradivisional matchups. The series also puts the focus back on the Ivy League. Winning the Ivy title used to be viewed as a way to get into the NCAA's big dance. And while an NCAA bid is still at stake, the Ivy championship series has become an event unto itself - something that players will remember, win or lose, much longer than two blowout losses to Stanford, Florida State, or some other top-ranked team in the NCAA tournament. You can reach Matt Golden at golden2@erols.com
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