Army Lacrosse: Winning Battles, But Losing to a Spreadsheet
If there were ever a shining, helmet-clad example of why the RPI should be launched into low-Earth orbit and left to float alongside obsolete satellite dishes, it’s the snub of the Army lacrosse team from this year’s NCAA Championship. Now, this isn't about Harvard — hats off to the Ivy kids for earning their invite. But Army? They had the kind of season that would make General Patton high-five a lacrosse stick. Unfortunately, instead of getting a ticket to the big dance, they got ghosted by the selection committee, all because of a few numbers that seem to have been calculated by a calculator suffering from low self-esteem. Let’s talk “the numbers” — RPI, SOS, and Quality Wins — the NCAA’s holy trinity of acronyms. They sound impressive until you realize they’re basically just dressed-up math problems pretending to understand lacrosse. RPI allegedly measures performance. SOS allegedly measures the toughness of your schedule. And Quality Wins? That’s just beating teams the RPI thinks are good. But when the RPI is flawed, SOS is wobbly, and “Quality” is a polite fiction — you get Army being told “thanks, but no thanks” despite bulldozing through opponents like it was D-Day on turf. Let’s check the highlight reel: • Blasted UMass: 16–9 • Smothered Yale: 14–3 • Flattened Rutgers: 9–3 • Gave UNC a good ol' Patriot wake-up call: 13–12 Their average margin of victory? Six goals — practically a lacrosse landslide. Army finished 12–2, including a clean sweep of teams from the Big Ten, ACC, and Ivy League — the Holy Trinity of Lacrosse Royalty. If this were a war, they didn’t just win battles — they stormed the league like a tactical unit with nothing to lose but playoff hopes. But alas, RPI struck again: • 12th in RPI • 29th in SOS (ouch) • 10th in Quality Wins That wasn’t good enough for the eight at-large bids. Why? Because Army played in the Patriot League, where apparently wins don’t count if your opponents aren’t Instagram-famous. You see, the RPI doesn’t care how badly you beat someone — a 1-goal squeaker and a 15-goal annihilation are scored the same. So Army could’ve replaced their defense with garden gnomes and it wouldn’t have mattered. They even tried to boost their résumé with out-of-conference games, scheduling Yale, UNC, and Rutgers. But Yale had a midlife crisis, Rutgers was meh, and UNC found itself too late to help Army’s numbers. So who’s to blame? 1. Not Army — they showed up, saluted, and steamrolled. 2. Not the selection committee — they were following orders. 3. Not even the people who set the criteria — they thought they were doing math. 4. The real villain? The RPI: a system from the disco era that’s somehow still being used in 2025. (Basketball ditched it in 2018 and hasn’t looked back.) In conclusion, if Army’s season were a thesis, and the RPI were grading it, the paper would fail because it used real-world results instead of imaginary math. Maybe Army should just join the ACC. That way, they'd get better numbers, an automatic bid, and probably a commemorative bobblehead. Until then, they’ll have to settle for being the best team not in the tournament — and the most statistically betrayed. PR = Power Rating Date Opponent Conf/State (W-L, PR) Score 208 A UMass Atlantic 10 ( 9- 6, 93.6) 16- 9 215 H Rutgers B1G ( 7- 9, 95.2) 9- 3 219 A Yale Ivy ( 5- 8, 94.9) 14- 3 222 N Mercer ASUN ( 2-11, 87.7) 17- 4 301 H Lafayette Patriot (10- 6, 94.7) 15- 5 308 A Holy Cross Patriot ( 4-11, 91.0) 17- 4 315 A Lehigh Patriot ( 5-10, 94.3) 13- 4 322 H Boston Univ Patriot (11- 5, 95.5) 9-10 329 H No Carolina ACC (10- 4, 97.4) 13-12 405 A Colgate Patriot (10- 7, 96.7) 13- 7 412 A Navy Patriot ( 8- 7, 94.1) 12-11 419 H Bucknell Patriot ( 5- 9, 92.6) 20-11 425 H Loyola Patriot ( 3-11, 93.4) 18- 6 502 H Colgate Patriot (10- 7, 96.7) 13-16 Army's Record: 12-2; Average Goal Margin ~ 6 goals Patriot League: 7-2 Big 10: 1-0 IVY: 1-0 ACC: 1-0 Atlantic 10: 1-0 ASUN: 1-0 LAF: For The Fan, For The Sport