“I would say the ACC is definitely more intense because everything happens so much faster,” said Tillman, a former head coach at Harvard. “In the Ivy League, every player is recruited by the same schools. They know you and you know them. They scheme because they have really smart kids and they take away a lot of your strengths. You’re always trying to adjust and everyone is well prepared.
“Here, so many plays are spontaneous plays. When the ball is on the ground, you never know what is going to happen because the players and the game are so much faster.”
All season long they kept saying the ACC was over-rated and that the four teams in the league were only average. Some even suggested that the ACC wasn’t a legitimate conference because there were only four teams.
But when the final four began Saturday at M&T Bank Stadium, three of the teams were Maryland, Duke and Virginia. The last time we checked, those schools were affiliated with the ACC.
Some took the ACC lightly this season because there wasn’t a super team, no Syracuse of the late 1980s or Princeton of the 1990s.That certainly proved to be true, but the same could be said about all of lacrosse. But if the ACC isn’t the best league, name one that is better.
The Big East? That conference has Syracuse and Notre Dame, but that’s about it. Both got knocked out of the postseason by ACC teams.
The Ivy League has Cornell, but Penn and Harvard would get chewed up in the ACC. Maryland coach John Tillman agreed.
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