Visualizing CJ Kirst’s Record Tying Career

By now, you have probably heard about the incredible season that CJ Kirst is having. 

Last weekend against Harvard, Kirst tied the all-time NCAA goals record of 224, set last year by Payton Cormier. With one regular season game remaining and playoffs after that, Kirst has time to not only break the record, but run with it. 

I explained a bit about this two weeks ago on The College Lacrosse Show!

Now up to 59 goals, he also has a realistic chance to break the all-time single season record of 82, most recently set by Miles Thompson. 

But even with all the hype in recent weeks, I am not sure people fully realize just how absurd this run of goal-scoring has been. Let’s visualize the numbers. 

Walking Amongst Giants

It’s worth noting that the NCAA record-keeping isn’t great, especially after last season. With so many players receiving COVID years, several records were broken last year, and it can be hard to track them all. Payton Cormier most famously broke the all-time scoring record, and others including Duke’s Dyson Williams and Brennan O’Neill were in contention to do the same. 

It’s also worth noting that Zack Greer scored more than his recorded 206 goals, but his season at Bryant did not officially count as they weren’t fully established as a D1 program. Otherwise, he would be the top dog. 

But let’s start with the last three players to hold the all-time goals record. Mac O’Keefe took the belt in 2021, when he broke Justin Guterding’s career mark of 212 goals. O’Keefe needed 66 games to score his 221 total goals.

Then two years later, Payton Cormier smashed O’Keefe’s record with an 8-goal outburst in the playoffs against St. Joseph’s. 

Cormier played twice more after that, pushing his career total to 224 goals, an incredible accomplishment. A three-time final-four participant, Cormier played 73 career games in Charlottesville.

Kirst took just 60 games to tie Cormier’s record. Most college teams play roughly 12-14 games in the regular season. That means CJ has played almost a full regular season less than Cormier. 

I looked at every game the three of these players played, and created a running total of their goals each game. The result shows you just how fast Kirst got there. Even compared to the other greatest players in history, he never had a major lull. 

The other thing this chart shows is the spike in goal-scoring for Kirst this season. At the 49th game of their careers, Kirst had 171 goals and O’Keefe had 170. By the 60th game, Kirst widened that gap to 22 goals, with 224 tallies compared to O’Keefe’s 202. 

To show the incredible consistency, look at his 60 games, sorted by number of goals. He has been held scoreless just 3 times in his college career. He has scored six or more goals 13 times in those 60 games. 

That’s incredible consistency.

Quality and Quantity

Kirst is accomplishing these numbers on incredible efficiency. He currently leads the nation in scoring by 13 goals, and is shooting 49% on the year. Among players with over 20 goals this year, only eight have shot more efficiently than Kirst. 

You don’t need to be a data scientist to realize that scatterplots shouldn’t look like this. One of these points is a significant outlier. 

But lacrosse is a “what have you done for me lately” sport, and CJ won’t care about any of these numbers. The Big Red will take their next step towards their goals on Senior Day Saturday vs the Dartmouth Big Green.