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Lehigh, Lafayette's Patriot League seedings still hazy

02/23/2015, 8:06pm EST

By Josh Verlin

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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The Patriot League’s regular season has come down to two days.

Each of the 10 teams is in action on both Wednesday and Saturday, in their final pairs of games before the Patriot League tournament gets underway on Tuesday, March 3.

Currently, Dave Paulsen’s Bucknell squad sits atop the Patriot League with a 12-4 record, but the Bison certainly don’t have an easy finish to the season. The only school with a chance of catching them is Colgate (10-6), while third-place Lehigh (9-7) has 8-8 Lafayette and Boston U right on its heels with American, Loyola and Navy all at 7-9. Army and Holy Cross, both 6-10, bring up the rear.

What it means is that there are no fewer than six teams who could be anywhere from the No. 3 to No. 8 slots, which is the difference between playing a home game in the quarterfinals and having to play in the first round, which features only the bottom four teams in the league.

“Our whole focus right now is to try to stay out of that seven through 10 game,” Lafayette coach Fran O’Hanlon said on Sunday after his Leopards downed the Mountain Hawks of Lehigh. “So I couldn’t tell you who’s in there and who’s at the bottom, just afraid that we’re going to be at the bottom.”

The parity in the league top-to-bottom has all 10 teams feeling like they have a good chance at making a real run in the Patriot League tournament and somehow earning the automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament that comes with that trophy.

What it means are that all 10 of the games this week should be close and hard-fought, with precious seeding on the line in every single contest.

“During this time of the year there’s always going to be a sense of urgency in every player,” Lehigh sophomore Tim Kempton said. “You’re coming down to playoff time and crunch time and no matter what place you’re in, I feel like it just picked up that much more, and every game’s not going to be a blowout game, every game’s going to be a battle like it was today, no easy wins are going to come.”

With every team playing each other twice in the 18-game, round-robin format during the regular season, any teams that split their matchups then get compared by their records against the top team in the league, then the team in second place, and so on.

So trying to figure out how things could break down is still plenty confusing. Bucknell gets the league’s top seed and bid into the NIT with a win in either of its final two games, but road trips to American and Lehigh won’t be easy. If they lose both and Colgate wins at Lafayette and at home against Lehigh, the Raiders will have the top seed by virtue of their two wins over the Bison.

Of course, the various coaches and players around the league are trying to ignore the math as much as possible.

“I am aware of the standings, but I try not to spend too much time on them,” Lehigh coach Brett Reed said. “I feel I get distracted. It’s hard for me to control who plays who and what happens here and what that means for us and our program.”

That the common opponent between the top two teams this week is Lehigh isn’t lost on the Mountain Hawks. With two wins, they have a chance to move up a seed in the Patriot League pecking order, but they need to finish a game ahead of Colgate in the standings--Colgate’s 2-0 record against Bucknell again making up the difference, as the best Lehigh can do against the Bison is split at 1-1 after losing to them on the road back in January.

Of course, if Reed’s team drops both game and ends up at 9-9 in conference play, the possibilities are all over the place. The only team of the five below them in the standings that they swept during the season is Navy, and at that point then it’s up to how the rest of the standings shake out as they would be 0-2 against both Colgate and Bucknell at that point.

Lafayette, just a game behind Lehigh and with a win against Colgate already under its belt, has a chance to wrap up the tiebreaker against its Lehigh Valley rival with a home win over Colgate this Wednesday. A win at Army as well and the Leopards would lock up no worse than the No. 4 spot and a home game in the quarterfinals; they have the tiebreaker over Boston U thanks to the Terriers going 0-4 against both Bucknell and Colgate.

“It’d be awesome if we can get a home game, we know we have a really good home atmosphere,” Lafayette senior Seth Hinrichs said. “Our fans are the best in the Patriot League, we think, they always seem to show up for big games. It would be great if we can get that, if not, we’ll go on the road, we did that last year and beat Loyola at Loyola.”

If Lafayette drops one of those two games, things really open up below them. The scenarios are too numerous to list here, but suffice it to say that the Colgate game is of utmost importance because of where the Raiders sit in the Patriot League standings.

“I haven’t looked at anything, to tell you the truth,” O’Hanlon said. “All I look at is we have Colgate now, because we’ve got to take care of who we’ve got to take care of. You can’t worry about who’s going to beat who, we put ourselves in the position that we have to win games.”

It’s a position the whole league is in. Get ready for a fun two days to see how it all shakes out.

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Patriot League standings/final opponents:
1. Bucknell (12-4)--@ Lehigh, @ American
2. Colgate (10-6)--@ Lafayette, Lehigh
3. Lehigh (9-7)--Bucknell, @ Colgate
4. Lafayette (8-8)--Colgate, Army
5. Boston U (8-8)--Army, Holy Cross
6. American (7-9)--Navy, Bucknell
7. Loyola (7-9)--@ Holy Cross, Navy
8. Navy (7-9)--@ American, @ Loyola
9. Army (6-10)--@ Boston U, @ Lafayette
10. Holy Cross (6-10)--Loyola, @ Boston U