With the regular season complete, there really isn’t much reason to bicker about who the No. 1 team in Division I men’s lacrosse is.
Notre Dame pretty emphatically put exclamation marks on that claim, shredding Virginia and Duke in the ACC tournament to improve to 12-1. The Fighting Irish’s lone loss came in overtime at home against Georgetown, and it has won 10 in a row since.
And as for who’s No. 2? That’s anyone’s guess.
Is it Duke, the No. 2 team in the RPI and the No. 2 seed in the NCAA tournament that heads into the postseason coming off a 10-goal loss?
Is it Johns Hopkins, which lost its Big Ten semifinal to Michigan but at least had won five in a row heading into its conference tournament?
Is it Denver, which lost a one-goal game at Villanova in the Big East semifinals and is living off its defense? Could it be a Big Ten team like Penn State or Maryland that got mauled in its last outing? Or a Syracuse or Virginia that was not competitive while dropping an ACC semifinal on Friday?
The non-Notre Dame team that arguably has looked the best over the last three weeks is Princeton, which has beaten both Penn and Yale twice in that span. Michigan is also 4-0 in that stretch, picking off Ohio State (twice), Johns Hopkins and Penn State.
The way the last few weeks have unfolded makes it seem like there are about eight teams that should be ranked No. 5 or No. 6. But that’s not how the exercise works, so this will have to do heading into the postseason — the final in-season Top 20 before the last ranking of 2024 drops in the days following the NCAA championship game.
USA LACROSSE DIVISION I
MEN’S TOP 20
1. Notre Dame, 12-1 (Prev: 1)
2. Johns Hopkins, 10-4 (Prev: 2)
3. Duke, 12-5 (Prev: 7)
4. Denver, 11-3 (Prev: 3)
5. Penn State, 11-4 (Prev: 5)
6. Maryland, 8-5 (Prev: 4)
7. Syracuse, 11-5 (Prev: 6)
8. Virginia, 10-5 (Prev: 8)
9. Princeton, 11-4 (Prev: 11)
10. Georgetown, 12-3 (Prev: 9)
11. Michigan, 10-6 (Prev: 18)
12. Penn, 9-6 (Prev: 16)
13. Cornell, 9-5 (Prev: 10)
14. Towson, 13-3 (Prev: 14)
15. Yale, 11-4 (Prev: 12)
16. Saint Joseph’s, 12-3 (Prev: 15)
17. Army, 11-3 (Prev: 13)
18. Richmond, 10-6 (Prev: 17)
19. North Carolina, 7-7 (Prev: 20)
20. Lehigh, 10-6 (Prev: NR)
Also considered (alphabetical order): Boston U (10-7), Delaware (9-5), Harvard (8-5), Sacred Heart (13-4), Utah (12-4), Villanova (9-7)