SoS is a huge component of tournament selection and not playing at least an ACC team likely killed them and then playing a team making the move from D3 and a bunch of also rans doesn't help. Rutgers only played 2 tournament teams - Hopkins and UMd - going 2-2. Hopkins played 6 going 3-3.

Don't get me wrong, Brown is going to torch Hopkins defense because it is awful but Hopkins is one of the 18 best teams in the country even with all of their issues.

Edited to add: If Rutgers should be mad at any team making the tournament it is Navy.

And won 15 straight after losing to tournament teams Navy and Denver. However, those 15 wins included only one tourney team, Duke, who they beat in OT. And they won their conference.

We were supposed to play Air Force in January in a pre-season game. I can't remember, did that not get played?

I like Hopkins. I feel nothing for Buttgers. Fuck Duke!

Hopkins had all kinds of issues this year. Their defense was going to be a huge work in progress. It only returned one long stick defenseman and one SSDM that played last year. The other two spots were filled by a freshman and junior transfer. Their starting LSM is a freshman that played attack in HS. Naturally, their clearing game was awful. Their goalie is a sophmore but not very good regardless.

But, before the year even started this year, they lost their 2 top middies for the year - one to NCAA violation, the other blew out his ACL. By 3/4 games in they had lost two additional top 6 middies and then lost another 2 line middie for a few weeks. So at one point, they only had 2 of their top 9 middies playing.

I thought I had read some rumblings earlier in the season about whether Petro was on the hot seat or not. I stand corrected.

he would have been fired. The team was geared for last year. Hopkins would have last made the FF in 2008 (the last Rabil year) and 2016 was the last year of his contract if they didn't make it. Thus, it would have been easier to fire him. He made the FF and was a pipe away from the championship game and got an extension until 2020. I think it was sort of a mistake to give him that long. There is no doubt the program has struggled over the last 6-7 years more than it should given parity.

Most people expected Hopkins to struggle on defense with only 1 real guy coming back and rely on their offense. But, it is almost shocking how bad the defense is. The offense is top 5 or so with 12.8 GAF but defense is an all time worst under Petro at 11.4.