Men's lacrosse rankings: Maryland jumps to second and third in polls

The latest lacrosse polls were released Monday and Maryland made more than a bit of a jump moving from number 7 to number 3 in the coaches poll and from fifth to second in the media poll. Does anyone think the Terps 16-8 thrashing of Syracuse might have had something to do with that?

Syracuse, previously top ranked by the coaches plummeted to number eight. The media was a bit less punitive dropping the Orange from second to sixth.

The current ACC now holds the top four spots in both polls with the coaches placing them as Duke, UNC, Maryland, and Virginia and the media flip-flopping the Terps and the Tar Heels. The future B1G has three of the top ten with Maryland, Johns Hopkins (5 coaches / 7 media), and Penn State (9/10).

What do we really learn from all this folderol? Mostly we get to see that until games are actually played, judging who's better than whom is essentially guesswork. We can conclude that some teams are playing a bit better than the guessers thought they would be before the beginning of the season or even after the first week. And vice versa.

I think we also get to see that we should look at these polls for the speculative exercise they really are. Can you seriously argue that after a one goal loss at home to Virginia and a one goal win at Albany a previously unranked Drexel Dragons squad suddenly became the fifteenth or sixteenth best in the nation?

But I'm a bit of a cynic, because frankly come Memorial Day weekend, this ranking means, as they might say at K-R, nada. If you're not, focus in on the media poll, Terp fans, and shout, "We're number two! We're number two!"