BALTIMORE, Maryland November 18, 2013 - The NCAA released the 48-team field for the 2013 NCAA Soccer Championship on Monday, doing a number on UMBC and Maryland and other traditional ACC schools in the process, while giving great advantages to the Pac-12 and UCLA in particular. Maryland (13-3-5), regular season ACC Co-Champ and winner of the ACC Tournament Sunday in Germantown, will play Sunday in College Park against the winner of Thursday's first round match between Providence (12-5-3) and Penn (8-8-1). Should the Terps prevail, they will play the following weekend against the team that emerges from the trio of North Carolina (8-5-5), South Florida (8-3-9), and the University of California at Irvine. The Anteaters (14-4-3), and ranked No. 18 in the most recent NSCAA Coach's poll, are the other seeded team besides Maryland in that sextet of schools. The NCAA Selection Committee seeded three Pac-12 schools in the top 4, including UCLA (11-3-4) No. 1, Washington (14-1-4) No. 2 and California (12-4-2) No. 4. Notre Dame (12-1-6), which finished tied with Maryland for the ACC regular season title, but lost to Virginia in the semi-finals of the ACC Tournament after blowing leads of 2-0 and 3-1 in the second half, is seeded third while Maryland is seeded fifth (the NCAA tries to say that Notre Dame did not lose the match on Friday because it was tied at the end of overtime. But the winner of the match was determined in a shootout in which each team takes five penalty kicks and Virginia won that, 4-3). Virginia is seeded eighth. The Cavaliers were 12th in the last poll, while the Irish were No. 1 and Maryland No. 4. Wake Forest of the ACC, which lost in the conference quarterfinals, is seeded 14th. UMBC, ranked in the top 10 all season and with only one loss, is seeded 16th even though it routed Hartford, 4-0, in the America East Tournament Championship. Two other ACC Schools were named to the Tournament field without being seeded, meaning they will play in the first round on Thursday evening. As mentioned, North Carolina will play South Florida while Clemson, a 1-0 ACC Tournament loser to Maryland, in overtime, in the semi-finals last Friday, will play at home against Elon, which was in and out of the Top 25 during the season and finished with a mark of 15-4-2. The Phoenix beat Wofford (11-7-1), 1-0, in a steady rain in Greenville, South Carolina, when Junior Jason Waterman took a pass from Sophmore Caue Da Silva and beat Terrier Freshman Keeper Garrett Closs in the second minute of the second overtime. It was Elon's third straight Southern Conference Championship. The winner of that game will fly across the country to play UCLA on Sunday in Los Angeles. Throughout team sports, teams forced to fly across the country to play fare worse than teams with lesser distances between their home and their opposition's home. Certainly the Committee was aware of this, yet they give UCLA this advantage in several rounds. UMBC (16-1-2) will play the winner of Quinipiac (9-4-7) and Connecticut (11-2-6) on Sunday evening in Catonsville. Should the Retrievers prevail, they, too, face the prospect of flying across the country to Los Angeles to face UCLA. Of course, the Bruins would have to beat Clemson or Elon to make that happen, and it is no sure bet despite the NCAA giving the Bruins a huge advantage. UCLA, despite three losses, including in the Pac-12 tournament and against two non-conference opponents from lesser conferences, without a great distance to travel until the fourth round at the earliest, when it will likely face the winner of Akron and Virginia (for reasons known only to the Committee it has seeded Marquette, with five losses, ninth and has not seeded Akron. But the Zips, should they beat sub-.500 Indiana, will face Marquette in the second round. If Akron wins there - an extremely likely result - it would face the winner of the trio of Delaware, St. John's and Virginia. That is likely to be Virginia if the Cavaliers aren't too discombobulated by their loss to arch rival Maryland in the ACC Championshp. Sadly, after that game the Virginia coach was critical of star defender Matt McBride, who inadvertently was charged with an own goal after a stunning drive by All-American Patrick Mullins of Maryland.). Navy won the Patriot League Title on Sunday when it shut out Holy Cross (9-9-2), 2-0. It was the ninth shut out for Navy, which now travels to Richmond to play Virginia Commonwealth, with the winner drawing Wake Forest on Sunday in Winston-Salem. Geoff Fries and Joseph Greenspan scored for the Midshipmen (15-3-2), Fries' goal - his first of the season - came on a breakaway which got started when Senior Patrick Sopko launched a bicycle kick from near his own goal that was kicked with enough power to sail over everyone's head. Fries ran onto it and then beat the Crusader Keeper, who followed conventional wisdom and came off the line to challenge Fries. Navy's Coach, Dave Brandt, told the School's web reporter that he honestly believes his side - below the radar all season - is a true threat in the NCAA, and he may be right. Wake Forest is totally unpredictable: able to upend Maryland in a critical test in College Park, but capable of losing to anybody. The Deacons failed to win a single game in the ACC Tournament. Delaware (14-4-1), the only team to beat UMBC, will play St. John's (10-6-2) on Thursday in New York City. If the Blue Hens win they will travel to Charlottesville to play Virginia on Sunday. Defending National Champ Indiana, which had a miserable season and finished 8-11-2, pulled itself together in the end and won the Big Ten Tournament by beating Michigan State, 1-0. The Hoosiers will play powerful Akron (16-3-2), winner of the Mid-American Conference. The Zips whacked Western Michigan (9-9-1), the tournament's No. 2 seek, 4-1, scoring two goals in the first 13 minutes and cruising from there. Actually, the school's website reported that the final score indicates a game that in reality wasn't that close. Besides the two early scores, the Zips actually missed a penalty kick in the 4th minute and had two other goals disallowed for alleged offsides.
The NCAA will try to say that UMBC suffered due to a weak schedule. The cancellation of the Retriever's game at William and Mary - a tournament at-large team - certainly contributed to that situation. But with the parity that prevails throughout Division I, a campaign with only one loss in 19 matches is indicative of a superior team with superior talent. To seed a side like that 16th while seeding a side like Marquette, with nearly a half-dozen losses, ninth, is indicative of a group of people with agendas that went beyond results on the field. and who knows what this committee will say about the way it treated Maryland. The Terps tied Notre Dame in South Bend, tied for the Regular Season ACC crown with the Irish, and won the post-season tournament that saw Notre Dame bow out in the second round, yet Maryland was seeded behind Notre Dame. Maryland opened the season at Stanford (a draw) then lost at California in overtime. Both are in the national tournament. Besides beating its ACC rivals, the Terps also played and beat Drexel and tied Old Dominion, also going to the national tournament. They also played Virginia Commonwealth and lost narrowly. Virtually all of Maryland's setbacks came early in the season as they broke in true freshmen at both center defense positions and at Keeper. In their last nine matches, dating from October 15, the Terps have given up more than one goal only once, and in the ACC Tournament they recorded three consecutive shutouts even though two of the games went into overtime. Truth be known, Maryland expected to be mistreated throughout this season because of their decision to leave the ACC for the Big Ten. But they expected most of the shafting to be done by the conference, not the national governing body. Maryland Coach Sascho Cirovski is in his 21st season in College Park without even a hint of misdeeds and now with 20 consecutive winning seasons. He is regarded as a visionary. One wonders what one has to do to get a fair shake from people pretending to be his peers. Truth be known, it was an obvious groveling attempt to butter-up Notre Dame that prompted this absurd shaft of one of the college game's most storied teams, Maryland. The ACC sends a country-best six teams to the national tournament (and the decision not to select Duke and Boston College is certainly open to criticism), proving without question that the ACC is the toughest conference in the land, yet winning both the ACC's regular season and post-season tournament is not enough to get a seed higher than another one of the conference's other teams. Yikes! I wonder if the NCAA will make available a list of the sport's Tournament Selection Committee?
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