BY WILL KUHNS
SENIOR EDITOR
The surprises of this year's draw are:
1) Preferences given to ACC teams
2) High number of Midwest teams
3) Seeds who may face conference rivals in their first match
4) Santa Clara's unseeding.
1) In the third year of a 48-team field, the tournament selection committee again leaned toward the traditional soccer conferences. The ACC received three of the top four seeds in the tournament, granting Maryland, Wake Forest and North Carolina home-field advantage through the quarterfinals.
Although the Big East tied the ACC for the most entrants with six, only Notre Dame and St. John's are seeded. The Pac-10 and West Coast Conference have four bids each.
Supporting that bias is the fact that in the past 10 years, 35 of the 40 national semifinalists are now in one of six conferences: ACC (8), Big Ten (7), Pac-10 (7), Big East (5), Missouri Valley (4), West Coast Conference (4). Five teams from other leagues have reached the College Cup since 1993 and only one in the past six years, that being Saint Louis in 1997.
Each of the 23 conference champions received an automatic bid. For 12 conferences, that is their lone representative in the tournament. The 25 at-large bids were split among 11 conferences as follows:
ACC- 5 (Maryland, Wake Forest, North Carolina, N.C. State, Clemson)
Big East – 5 (St. John's, Virginia Tech, Rutgers, Seton Hall, Connecticut)
Pac 10 – 3 (Washington, Oregon State, California)
West Coast Conference 3 (LMU, San Diego, Portland)
Mid-American – 2 (Kentucky, Akron)
Missouri Valley – 2 (Tulsa, Creighton)
Big Ten – 1 (Michigan)
Big West – 1 (UCSB)
CAA – 1 (Old Dominion)
Conference USA – 1 (Cincinnati)
Mid-Continent – 1 (Oakland)
2) Geographically, the Midwest led in number of bids. The NCAA divides the country into eight regions, but combining them allows a breakdown of the four broader regions:
MIDWEST (Midwest, Great Lakes): 14
SOUTH (South Atlantic, South): 13
WEST (Far West): 11
EAST (Middle Atlantic, New England, New York): 10
3) Five schools that earned a seed may have to face a conference rival in their first match: Wake Forest may host Virginia, which just beat the Demon Deacons in the ACC Tournament; St. John's might host arch-rival Connecticut; Washington may face Oregon State for the second game in a row; Loyola Marymount might have to defend its recent 3-0 win against Santa Clara, and Maryland may play N.C. State for the third time this season.
4) Santa Clara's loss to LMU in its regular-season finale almost certainly cost the Broncos a seed. Santa Clara went 4-3-2 this season against other teams that made the tournament. By comparison, here are some of the other seeds' records against teams receiving bids: Washington (4-4-2), UCSB (3-2-1), Michigan (3-4-0), LMU (5-4), San Diego (2-3-1), Akron (4-4-2), Cal State Northridge (3-2-1).