With Brendan Millon’s commitment to Virginia on Tuesday night, there’s an argument to be made the Cavaliers overtook Notre Dame for the best class of 2025 commitments.
And with only No. 2-ranked junior Gary Merrill (St. Anthony’s, N.Y. / Team 91 LI Shock) and No. 34 Mathew Triolo (John Glenn Elwood, N.Y. / Team 91 LI Shock) left uncommitted 34 days after Sept. 1, the rankings are rounding into the status quo they’re likely to maintain until at least when we expand the rankings to the top 100 players in the class.
With that, it’s worth looking at the output of IL’s newly updated class rankings formulas, which improved upon our prior objective ranking method that had been on the Recruiting Database for years. Patrick McEwen wrote about the new methodology here, but the important things to know are:
This page actually displays two rating methods
The rankings are sorted by the first one that McEwen created
That method most closely predicts IL’s subjective rankings historically
It doesn’t include a unit amount (only an ordering)
The second rating is the right two columns, which does include a unit amount
In the former, Virginia jumped from No. 9 to No. 5 on Saturday by virtue of LSM Robby Hopper’s commitment, the fifth-ranked player in the class, then from No. 5 to No. 4 with four-star attackman Preston Evans’ commitment the following day, and then finally to No. 1 overall on Tuesday after landing the No. 1 player in the class. On Wednesday, the Cavaliers added No. 50 Wes Martin (St. Anne's Belfield, Va. / Madlax). With that, UVA locked up Nos. 1, 5, 13, 31, 36, 46 and 50, in addition to two unranked four-stars in its now nine-player class.
Rank | Team | 5* | 4* | 3* | Points | Points Break
1) Viriginia | 3 | 6 | 0 | 510.4 | 2
2) Notre Dame | 4 | 6 | 0 | 524.5 | 1
3) Duke | 3 | 4 | 0 | 467.2 | 4
4) UNC | 3 | 6 | 0 | 467.2 | 3
5) Maryland | 2 | 4 | 3 | 451.8 | 6
6) Penn | 1 | 5 | 3 | 439.7 | 8
7) Princeton | 0 | 6 } 3 | 434.1 | 11
8) Georgetown | 0 | 7 | 1 | 426.6 | 9
9) Johns Hopkins | 0 | 8 | 3 | 454.1 | 5
{5*, 4* & 3* = Star Ratings)
All the while, Notre Dame has held firm as the No. 1 class by Points, the second rating method. This method scaled the approximate player ranks to make No. 1 recruit worth 10 points, not having a recruit worth 0 points, and then scaled to the total number of players that have committed or been given star ratings across 10 points. Team totals are a 10x multiplier for the top recruit, 9x for second-highest, down to 1x for the 10th recruit.
The Fighting Irish’s class features Nos. 8, 15, 17, 19, 22, 25, 33 and 48, plus four unranked four-stars in its 12-player class. The defending national champions raced out of the gate, landing commitments from five Top 50 players in the first 13 days after Sept. 1. As a result, they entered the middle of the month with a healthy lead in both ratings methods.
To simplify it, Virginia’s class is ranked ahead of Notre Dame’s on one basis because it landed three of the four highest ranked players between the two teams. Meanwhile, Notre Dame’s class outranks Virginia’s on another basis because of its combination of quantity and quality.
Which class do you think is better? Vote by commenting below
-Inside Lacrosse
