Naptown fan, I disagree with you about the causes of what has been happening at PU in the last few yrs. You attribute the recent bad results to an admissions crackdown and consequent recruiting woes. I wish it was as simple as that.

Consider this statistic...

This year's PU team had SEVEN players that were ranked in the Inside Lacrosse top 10 in the year they were recruited (2004, 05, 06 & 07). Not just top 50...I'm talking about only those classified in the two highest categories (if you include top 50 the number is much much greater). I'm not talking about players near the bottom of the top 10 either. Coco & Hewit for ex were considered the top recruits at their positions in the entire nation the year they came up.

Do you know how many Inside Lacrosse top 10 recruits that Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn and Yale *COMBINED* got in that same 04-07 time period? Just one. ONE! All the rest of the Ivy teams combined!

The truth is that...relative to the recruiting success of the other Ivy teams...the recruiting gap in the last 4 yrs between PU and the other Ivy teams has been even greater than it was during PU's "glory years." And yet during that time PU's success vs. the other Ivy teams has dropped big-time. PU should have done much much better w/ this group compared to the Ivy competition.

I no longer think that quality recruits will solve the problem for PU...Something else is amiss. The whole is less than the sum of the parts. Meanwhile the other Ivy teams are doing much more with much less talent. That is not something that we could ever say about PU before in the Tierney era.

Next year's freshmen look really great...but I don't think recruiting has been the problem for PU lately.