A few weeks ago, someone on Twitter/X sent me a scatter plot someone had made showing the average recruiting class rank of a program charted against the average number of PLL Draft picks that program sends pro. They asked if there was anything like this for lacrosse, and I said no, but there should be. That’s what started the journey down this extremely deep rabbit hole.
To begin with, I reviewed the MLL/PLL Drafts beginning in 2014. I tracked player taken and the school they were drafted from. Originally, I only credited the school that the player was selected from for the pick, but that leaves a minor gap because of transfers and grad years. More on that in a second.
If a player was drafted twice from two different schools, I credited both those schools with a draft pick produced. For example, in 2020, Michael Sowers was drafted out of Princeton by the MLL’s Boston Cannons. He returned to take a grad year at Duke, and was drafted by the Waterdogs in 2021. Both Princeton and Duke got credited with a draft choice in this scenario.
However, Jeff Teat was drafted three times, once by MLL’s Boston Cannons, once by PLL’s Chaos Lacrosse Club, and once by PLL’s Atlas Lacrosse Club. In this situation, because Jeff Teat was at Cornell the entirety of his college career, he only counts once as a pick produced for Cornell.
For the recruiting portion, I couldn’t find a solid archive of overall class rankings. What is easy to find though is the Inside Lacrosse Top 100 incoming freshman rankings. Those have been around for decades, and are still available with a quick search. I went through 2013 through 2023’s Top 100, tracking how many recruits a school got in the course of that time period. I didn’t include 2024, because those players haven’t even played a Fall Ball game yet, and because they aren’t even in college, didn’t feel as relevant to the conversation.
CONSIDERATIONS AND CAVEATS
The length of a given playing career in the pros does not matter for this exercise at all. If you were drafted, even if you never played in a pro game, you count as a pick produced for your school. There’s a version of this that could be “All Stars produced per Top 100 recruits” or All Pros, something along those lines, but that’s a different animal.
To take that further, lacrosse is unique. In any of the big four men’s pro sports, if a head coach or GM reaches out to a college player to say they plan on drafting them, that player will be elated and eager to begin their pro career and collect the salary and benefits that come with it. Pro lacrosse is different. A player may be more than good enough to be drafted, but may choose a different career path that is more lucrative or provides a different level of lifestyle than lacrosse would.
Why does this matter? Because Harvard and Princeton are at the bottom of this list. Harvard brings in plenty of elite recruits, but they don’t send many players pro via the draft. It’s likely that a significant number of these players chose Harvard for the academic opportunity, network of alumni, and other benefits to their post-collegiate life, and had a plan in mind for themselves that never included pro lacrosse. Could be getting straight to their career, could be grad school, any number of things. It’s not a reflection on the program itself; these players aren’t regressing or not worthy of being a draft pick. Some just might not want to play pro lacrosse. Harvard is the example I use here, but the Ivy’s in particular I’d expect would be impacted by this. Navy is down near the bottom as well, and because of their service commitments, sometimes go undrafted even if they are elite talents.
Another caveat is, given the time period, multiple years of recruiting classes are still in college. Brennan O’Neill was #1 in the 2020 incoming recruit rankings, he’s a PLL rookie this year. So there are a few years worth of recruits who can tilt these numbers. Syracuse has 18 Top 100 recruits in the last two years, they will assuredly have plenty of draft picks with players like Joey Spallina, Owen Hiltz, Billy Dwan, and others They’re ratio should climb. Maryland has been below their 10 year average of Top 100 recruits for the last three years, their ratio could be changing too.
Here’s where we land:
What do all these numbers mean? Let’s start at the top with all those DIV/0’s.
Anyone who has a DIV/0 has not had a top 100 recruit during this time frame. You cannot divide by 0, so the formula gets confused. These schools have, however, sent at least one player pro in the draft.
The biggest standout here to me is Jacksonville. Seven players drafted in the last 10 years, and they have yet to land a Top 100 recruit. Nobody else comes close to that level of development. Their most recent draftee is Troy Hettinger. The Dolphins coaching staff currently includes John Galloway and JT Giles-Harris, two outstanding pros in their own right, so I am not surprised to see that they know a thing or two about developing a pro level player. Jacksonville is also a very active portal team, finding players who can help them from the DII and DIII ranks every year. Stony Brook with five draftees and zero Top 100 recruits is right behind them. They’ve had some serious Canadian talent come through with players like Ryland Rees and Challen Rogers, both drafted, neither Top 100.
The Canadians are a thread through this portion of the list. Robert Morris, St Bonaventure, RIT, Limestone, even Tampa has had Canadian standouts who were not Top 100, but went on to be drafted.
Turning to the part of the list where schools have had some Top 100 players, things are interesting right at the top. As a general rule, if the Picks/Recruit number is 1 or larger, it means the school is producing more pro draft picks than it is bringing in Top 100 recruits. The closer you get to zero, the fewer top recruits become draft picks. There’s nuance along the way, because some schools may produce only one or two picks, but also have only one or two top recruits. Numbers very far from one, either over or under, tend to be where things get interesting.
Bryant has produced 10 MLL/PLL draft picks in the last decade. They average a player picked per year. In that time they’ve had a total of three Top 100 recruits. It’s a pretty stunning level of finding gems outside the Top 100, and developing good players into pro draft ready players. They weren’t all early round picks, mostly mid level picks but solid pros. Guys like Kevin Massa or Gunnar Waldt. It is also notable that Mike Pressler was Bryant’s head coach in this period.
Hobart with six draftees and just a single top 100 recruit in ten years is also excellent. The last Hobart players drafted were Sean Lucchesi and Eric Holden in 2020, so it’s been a while, but finding draftable talent with so few Top 100 players is impressive.
High Point is a banner program for this exercise as well. Like Bryant, 10 players drafted in the last decade, and one few Top 100 players. High Point has produced Asher Nolting and Tim Troutner, the latter winning Rookie of the Year and the former being an Attackman of the Year finalist. Both have been All Stars. High Point’s former coach Jon Torpey developed no shortage of exceptional pro talent without bringing in regular crops of blue chippers.
Other schools who perform well here are Hofstra, Marquette, Rutgers, Albany, Towson, and Bucknell. Hofstra’s most recent draft pick was Ryan Tierney, the latest of seven players drafted in the last decade even though the program had five Top 100 players during that span. Marquette has sent guys like Liam Byrnes, Jake and Noah Richard, and Mason Woodward pro, while they also have very few Top 100 recruits. Rutgers benefits a lot from the portal here; three of their draftees are grad transfers. But even without those, they’d be performing very well on draft picks per Top 100 recruit.
Maryland is, as expected, a factory. They had 39 players drafted while averaging 6.2 top 100 recruits per year. No one else has even broken the 30 players picked mark, and Maryland is pushing 40. Elite talent goes to Maryland, and the Terps develop and send that elite talent to the pros. More than 60% of their Top 100 recruits end up going pro, an exceptional hit rate considering just how many of them there are.
Ohio State does extremely well sending players to the pros. They average 2.1 players drafted per year, and three Top 100 recruits. It’s actually a better rate than their Big 10 rival Maryland, though the sheer volume of players makes Maryland pretty impressive.
Outside of the Big 10 and ACC, Loyola has been consistently good. A smaller number of recruits and draft picks, but Vermont also does very well, particularly when you adjust for transfer players (again, more on this in a second). Lehigh is very strong too.
On the down side, North Carolina is near the basement. They bring in 7.3 top 100 recruits per season, the biggest number in the country and one of just two schools over seven. North Carolina also has the single biggest recruiting year of anyone in the last decade, with 11 Top 100 players in 2021. With all that talent, they average just two players drafted per year. Two draftees per year is great, but the ratio isn’t.
As a comparison, Denver produces the same amount of picks per year, but from half the number of Top 100 recruits. Ohio State and Loyola have similar numbers to Denver. The other school with over 7 recruits a year is UVA, they produced 2.4 picks a year. A half a pick better than Carolina with that volume of recruits is significant. As noted above though, Carolina’s giant recruiting class in 2021 is still in school. The Heels are well positioned to boost their draft pick ratio.
Many of the other schools near the bottom are Ivy’s, who lose players for grad years. So let’s finally get to that.
WHAT ABOUT THOSE TRANSFERS?
I said we’d come back to this. As a reminder, when I counted draft picks, I only counted them for the school they came from. But that, probably unfairly, takes a draft pick credit away from a school where a player may have spent four years before going pro. In theory it particularly hurts schools who aren’t allowed to take grad transfers or give students athletes a fifth year.
So I went back through the draftees since the launch of the PLL. The transfer portal and the PLL have been around about the same amount of time, and that also covers COVID years. If a player was taken in the PLL Draft, I went back and adjusted the draft pick total to credit all schools that player attended before being drafted. For example, Chayse Ierlan now counts for both Cornell and Johns Hopkins, rather than just Johns Hopkins. I did NOT take picks away from schools though. Brian Tevlin now counts for Yale and Notre Dame, not just Yale or just Notre Dame.
As you can imagine, this did mostly impact Ivy schools. Princeton last year alone saw multiple players drafted from schools that aren’t Princeton (Jake Stevens, Alex Vardaro, Beau Pederson). All told, there are 26 transfer players who add at least one pick for a school.
Adjusted for transfers in the PLL Draft, the data looks like this:
Obviously the Ivy’s all climb. Yale adds three more players picked (Brian Tevlin, Chris Fake, and Jackson Morrill). TD Ierlan already counted for Yale because the Lizards drafted him. Princeton adds their three players from this year’s draft. Penn adds three picks. Cornell adds two players. No shock the Ivy’s add picks. Yale is the best in the Ivy, adjusting for transfers or not, sending over two picks per year to the pros. Adjusted for transfers it’s nearly 2.5 players. That’s while averaging five Top 100 recruits. Cornell is right behind them.
Who else adds picks? The Patriot League. They can’t take grad transfers, and many players in the league pursue grad years at blue blood programs. Lehigh picks up two players (Cole and Colin Kirst), BU adds Chris Gray, Army adds Marcus Hudgins, Colgate adds Brian Minicus. Big East also dispersed some talent and pick up some players.
Who benefited most from that talent? From just a number of players point of view, the Big 10 and the ACC. Of those 26 players, 11 went to the Big 10. Four went to Maryland, three went to Rutgers. Ten players went to the ACC, with five heading to Notre Dame. The Big East picked up the remaining five, all of them going to Georgetown except for Jackson Morrill at Denver.
Also of note, Cleveland State adds their lone draft pick this way, because Jake Higgins was there before transferring to Maryland.
A longer dive all the way back to 2024 could produce a few more players, but not enough to significantly change the numbers, as the portal, COVID year, and fifth year movement is a more recent phenomenon.
WHAT ABOUT THE NLL?
I got this question a few times when I first talked about these numbers on social. Surely RIT, Robert Morris, etc would dominate if we did this for the NLL, right? Not exactly. They still don’t have any Top 100 recruits, so they’d just be credited for sending a lot of guys to the pros, which we know they do anyway.
I’d need some other criteria for ranking/evaluating the players before college, and then going to the NLL, other than recruit ranking. We all knew Callum Jones was an excellent indoor talent, but he wasn’t a Top 100 recruit and went to Norwich, so a little off the radar of us Americans. I’d be open to doing this again for the NLL folks if they have ideas for the best way to structure it.
I HAVE MORE QUESTIONS!
This rabbit hole is more like a rabbit cavern, I don’t blame you. So all the data I used is available to you to have a look at. It’s on the Google Sheet here.
You can view the totals, make a copy and manipulate it yourself, see the draft results back to 2001 if you want, any of that stuff.
Make sure to follow LCD for more data work!