Phillylacrosse.com, Posted 2/1/13
The Loyola men claimed the No. 1 position in Lacrosse Magazine’s 2013 NCAA Division I preseason rankings. The release of the Top 20 rankings concludes a four-week countdown of daily profiles of the nation’s best teams on LaxMagazine.com/LMranks.
The defending national champion Greyhounds are coming off an 18-1 season that included the ECAC Lacrosse League regular-season and tournament championships. Ranked No. 19 by Lacrosse Magazine entering 2012, Loyola suffered only a 10-9 defeat to rival Johns Hopkins and earned the No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament. The Greyhounds beat Canisius, Denver (for a third time), Notre Dame and Maryland to win the program’s first NCAA championship. Attackman Mike Sawyer (52 goals, 10 assists) leads a host of returnees for Loyola, which battled the U.S. men’s national team in a 17-13 exhibition defeat Sunday at Champion Challenge, a US Lacrosse event. Maryland, which advanced to the NCAA final in 2011 and 2012, enters this season ranked No. 2.
Lacrosse Magazine’s NCAA Division I men’s preseason rankings as follows:
NCAA Division I Men
1. Loyola
2. Maryland
3. Duke
4. Notre Dame
5. Johns Hopkins
6. Denver
7. Cornell
8. North Carolina
9. Virginia
10. Lehigh
11. Colgate
12. Syracuse
13. UMass
14. Penn State
15. Princeton
16. Yale
17. Villanova
18. Fairfield
19. Hofstra
20. Bryant
