An op-ed examining six seasons of the Peter Milliman era and the uncomfortable question Blue Jays alumni keep refusing to ask out loud.
On Saturday, May 9, 2026, on a road trip to Ithaca that nobody outside the program expected to end well, the Johns Hopkins men’s lacrosse team did something Johns Hopkins men’s lacrosse used to do for a living. They knocked the defending national champion out of the NCAA tournament. Down 6-3 at halftime to seventh-seeded Cornell, the Blue Jays smothered the Big Red the rest of the way and won 9-8 in overtime on a Jimmy Ayers goal off a Matt Collison feed.
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It was the eighth time in program history Hopkins has bounced a reigning champion. And it raised, in the most awkward way possible, the question this program has been quietly avoiding for the better part of two decades:
Is a feel-good first-round upset still the standard at Johns Hopkins, or has it become the ceiling?
The dynasty, by the numbers
Forty-four national championships. Nine NCAA-era titles, second only to Syracuse’s ten. Appearances in every NCAA tournament ever played except for 1971, 2013, and 2021. A 1,000-plus-win all-time record. An on-campus building dedicated solely to the men’s and women’s lacrosse programs, which Mike Preston of the Baltimore Sun has pointed out are the only Division I sports on the Homewood campus.
This is not a program. It is an institution.
And institutions, eventually, calcify.
The mutual parting
On April 14, 2020, in the middle of a pandemic, Johns Hopkins announced that Dave Pietramala, the winningest coach in program history and one of the greatest defensemen ever to play the sport, would not return after 20 seasons. The school called it a mutual agreement. The athletic director said the program needed to move in a different direction.
Pietramala’s record was, by almost any rational measure, extraordinary: 207-93, 18 NCAA tournament appearances, seven Final Fours, four national title games, two championships (2005, 2007). But “by almost any rational measure” is the operative phrase. By the Hopkins measure, the last Final Four had come in 2015. The last national title game in 2008. The last championship in 2007. Pietramala himself, speaking to PressBox shortly after the split, framed it as differing visions on where the program should go and how to get there.
Translation: the wins were not enough.
The Cornell pipeline
Two weeks later, on April 27, 2020, Hopkins introduced its 23rd head coach in program history: Peter Milliman, then 41, most recently the head coach at Cornell, where he had gone 28-10 in two-plus seasons.
He was not a Blue Jay. He had not played at Hopkins, coached at Hopkins, or, until that press conference, set foot on the Homewood sideline as a head coach. For a program where the head coaching lineage stretches back to 1883 and includes names that other people’s awards are named after, hiring an outsider was a meaningful break with tradition.
It is worth pausing on how that decision got made.
The athletic director who let Pietramala go and then hired Milliman was Jennifer Baker. Baker had been promoted to the AD role on August 6, 2019, roughly eight months before Pietramala’s exit. Before Hopkins, Baker spent three years at Cornell, where she rose to Associate Director of Athletics for Facilities and founded the Big Red Leadership Institute. She earned her MBA and a master’s in mechanical engineering from Cornell. Her professional formation in college athletics, in other words, happened in Ithaca.
The coach she fired had spent two decades at Hopkins. The coach she hired had spent the prior six-plus years at Cornell, first as an assistant from 2014, then as defensive coordinator, then as head coach from 2018. The pipeline from Schoellkopf Field to Homewood Field was, by April 2020, very short.
None of this is scandal. Athletic directors hire people whose work they can evaluate from close range, and Baker would have known the Cornell program and the Cornell staff better than most. But it is a connection the Hopkins alumni base is allowed to notice, and a reasonable question to ask out loud: when the most tradition-rich job in the sport opened up, did the search produce the best available head coach in college lacrosse, or did it produce the head coach the new AD already knew from her last stop?
Six years of data
Here is what the six seasons of the Milliman era actually look like:
- 2021: 4-9. No NCAA tournament. Big Ten-only schedule due to COVID. The team’s first absence from the NCAAs since 2013.
- 2022: 8-7. A 22-7 home loss to Maryland that the Baltimore Sun called the worst defeat in program history.
- 2023: 12-6, a share of the Big Ten regular-season title, NCAA quarterfinals, a final national ranking of fifth. Milliman gets a multi-year contract extension that fall.
- 2024: 11-5, outright Big Ten regular-season title, NCAA second round, eliminated by Virginia in double overtime.
- 2025: 6-8, 0-5 in the Big Ten, missed the NCAA tournament. The worst winning percentage in a full season since 1971.
- 2026 (in progress): 9-5 regular season, Big Ten title game loss to Penn State, NCAA first-round upset of defending champion Cornell, quarterfinal date at Hofstra against Notre Dame on May 16.
The tale of the tape
Set the two coaches side by side and the gap is not subtle.
| Pietramala (2001-2020) | Milliman (2021-2026) | |
|---|---|---|
| Seasons | 20 | 5 completed, 6th in progress |
| Overall record | 207-93 | 40-37 (through 2025), 49-42 through May 12, 2026 |
| Winning percentage | .690 | .519 (through 2025), .538 (through May 12, 2026) |
| Wins per season | 10.4 | 8.0 |
| NCAA tournament appearances | 18 of 20 (90%) | 3 of 5 completed (60%) |
| NCAA tournament wins | Multiple per Final Four run, including two championship runs | 3 total (Bryant 2023, Lehigh 2024, Cornell 2026) |
| Final Fours | 7 | 0 |
| National title game appearances | 4 | 0 |
| National championships | 2 | 0 |
| Conference tournament titles | 2 (Big Ten, 2015 and 2018) | 0 |
Pietramala’s last four seasons in particular are the ones the Hopkins administration apparently found unacceptable: three first-round NCAA exits in four years, two of those teams entering at .500. That was the body of work that earned a “mutual parting.”
Milliman, by contrast, has now missed the NCAA tournament outright twice in six tries (2021 and 2025), has yet to win a conference tournament, has yet to reach a national semifinal, and as of his fifth full season was 40-37 overall. By the standard Hopkins applied to Pietramala in 2020, what is the corresponding standard for the coach who replaced him?
ESPN analyst and former Hopkins All-American goalkeeper Quint Kessenich, quoted in the Baltimore Sun’s 2026 preview, put it plainly: this is a make-or-break year for the staff.
The question nobody on Charles Street wants asked
The case made on the program’s behalf is familiar. Milliman inherited a program in transition, in a pandemic, in a Big Ten conference that did not exist when Hopkins last won a title. The sport itself has changed. Denver was not a national power when Pietramala took the job in 2001. Neither was Notre Dame. Neither, frankly, was Maryland in its current incarnation. As Pietramala himself acknowledged on the way out, the resources poured into college lacrosse have flattened the competitive landscape in ways that make the dynasty model harder to sustain.
Fine. Nobody serious is arguing that 2026 lacrosse is 2005 lacrosse.
But that is also the dodge. The same argument was made about Pietramala. The Final Four drought predates Milliman by five years. The last national title is now nineteen years old. And Hopkins, with the on-campus infrastructure, the brand, the alumni network, and the recruiting reach that comes from being one of two programs synonymous with the sport itself, is not Denver and not Notre Dame. The honest comparable is Syracuse. The honest comparable is Virginia. Those programs have hung Final Four banners during the same window Hopkins has been collecting first-round exits and grateful tweets about upsets.
So the question for the alumni base, the donor base, the people who write the checks that keep Cordish Lacrosse Center open, is whether Johns Hopkins lacrosse, as a brand and as a competitive enterprise, has quietly redefined success downward.
A quarterfinal every other year. A win over Maryland that snaps a five-game skid. A first-round upset that makes the highlight reels. These are nice things. They are not the Johns Hopkins standard, or at least they were not until very recently.
What Saturday actually proved
The Cornell win was not an answer. It was a data point. Hopkins now travels to Hempstead, New York for a quarterfinal on May 16, four days from now. Win that, and the program is in its first national semifinal since 2015, ending an eleven-year Final Four drought. Lose, and 2026 looks an awful lot like 2023 and 2024, which is to say a respectable season that ends one round short of mattering.
Hopkins fans have been telling themselves for years that the program is on the way back. The 2025 collapse said otherwise. The Cornell win said maybe.
May 16 will say something more.
Until then, the question remains the one nobody at the Hopkins Club is comfortable asking over the second drink: if Dave Pietramala was let go because the answer to “are the Blue Jays going to win a championship” had stopped being yes, then what exactly is the standard for the coach who replaced him? And what is the standard for the program that hired him? And how does that standard look six years in, with one missed tournament, one historically bad season, zero Final Fours, zero title games, and a head-to-head winning percentage 17 points lower than the man fired for not winning enough?
If the answer is that quarterfinals are enough, the people running Johns Hopkins lacrosse should say so out loud. If the answer is that they are not, they should say that too.
The dynasty deserves at least that much honesty.
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