With 11:22 left in the fourth quarter on May 9, in front of 6,805 fans at Robins Stadium, Richmond led Duke by three goals in the program’s first-ever NCAA tournament home game. The Blue Devils then scored the final five goals of the night. Richmond’s season ended 16-14, in the first round, as the highest-seeded mid-major program in an NCAA bracket since Denver in 2015.
That sentence deserves rereading. The highest-seeded mid-major in a decade still lost in the first round.
It was not embarrassing. It was not a collapse so much as a reminder. Duke is Duke. Richmond is Richmond. The gap is closing, but the floor of the bracket is still uneven. Dan Chemotti, who has coached every game in program history and who was on the staff at Loyola during the Greyhounds’ 2012 national championship run, understands that better than anyone. After Saturday, his program is now the closest analog in college lacrosse to the trajectory Loyola was on a decade and a half ago. The question is whether that trajectory still leads where it once did.
Since the NCAA tournament began in 1971, twelve schools have won a Division I men’s lacrosse national championship. Ten of them are blueblood programs you could name in your sleep: Johns Hopkins, Syracuse, Princeton, North Carolina, Virginia, Cornell, Duke, Maryland, Yale, Notre Dame. The other two are Loyola in 2012 and Denver in 2015. Those are the only true mid-major champions the sport has ever produced.
Eleven years have passed since the second one.
The Blueprint Is Not a Secret
Study Loyola 2012 and Denver 2015 side by side and the blueprint is not mysterious. It is, in some ways, almost reassuringly conventional.
First, a head coach with championship pedigree on the bench. Bill Tierney arrived at Denver in 2009 with six Princeton rings already in hand. Charley Toomey at Loyola was a Greyhound goalie when the program reached its only previous title game in 1990, and he had built his staff with assistants who had been to the mountain. You cannot win a national title with a coach learning the job in May. You need someone who has been in that hotel before, who already knows what the day before a national semifinal is supposed to feel like.
Second, a recruiting pipeline the ACC and the Ivy League are not fighting you over. Denver’s 2015 roster was a love letter to Canadian lacrosse and Western U.S. talent: Wesley Berg from Coquitlam, British Columbia, scored five goals in the title game and won the Most Outstanding Player award. Tyler Pace, Trevor Baptiste, Ryan LaPlante. Players from outside the traditional Northeast pipelines, all assembled by a coach who had spent two decades developing Northeastern blueblood rosters and knew exactly what the gap looked like.
Loyola did the opposite and got to the same place. They owned Baltimore. They took the kids who could have walked across town to play at Hopkins or Maryland and convinced them the Jesuit school with roughly 3,800 undergraduates was where they wanted to spend four years. Eric Lusby came from Severna Park. Mike Sawyer was a local. Both programs built rosters that the bluebloods either did not see or did not value enough to outbid for.
Third, a defense that can win an ugly game. Loyola won the 2012 title 9-3. Denver won the 2015 title 10-5. Neither final was an offensive showcase. Mid-majors do not out-talent the favorites in a track meet. They drag the favorites into the kind of game that rewards discipline, slide packages that hold up under pressure, and possession-by-possession decision-making. The teams that broke through both had the personnel to play that style and the willingness to live with the scores it produces.
Fourth, a goalie playing the tournament of his life. Jack Runkel for Loyola, Ryan LaPlante (13 saves in the title game) for Denver. Both were good all year. Both were great in May. There is no path to a mid-major championship in which the goalie has an average tournament.
Fifth, a hot scorer peaking at exactly the right time. Lusby’s 17 goals in the 2012 tournament set an NCAA record. Berg ended 2015 with a school-record 58 goals on the season. Neither was the projected Tewaaraton favorite in March. Both were rolling by Memorial Day.
Sixth, faceoff parity at minimum. Denver eventually had Baptiste, who turned into one of the greatest faceoff specialists in college history. Loyola’s defensive midfield, anchored by Scott Ratliff and Josh Hawkins, made every possession the offense did get worth something. You cannot win a national title getting your face caved in at the X.
And seventh, the most underrated ingredient: patience. Neither title was a Cinderella out of nowhere. Loyola had been to the NCAA tournament in 2007 and 2008 before Toomey’s full build paid off in 2012. Denver had been to Championship Weekend twice before they finally broke through. Both programs were knocking on the door before the door opened. The bracket caught up to the work.
Richmond Has the Checklist
Hold Richmond’s 2026 season up to that template and you find a program that has, deliberately or by feel, replicated the blueprint to a remarkable degree.
Chemotti is a Duke alum and a Loyola 2012 staffer. The championship pedigree on the bench is real. The pipeline is built: Richmond just won its second consecutive Atlantic 10 title with an undefeated league record, its third A-10 crown in four years, and its twelfth consecutive conference title-game appearance, the longest active streak in the country. They have built depth, including the kind of role players (Charlie Packard moving between defensive midfield and attack during the 2025 UNC win, for example) that championship teams rely on in May.
Defensively, the 2026 Spiders were elite. Top three nationally in goals allowed at 8.21 per game. Eighth in ground balls. Fourth in clearing percentage. Fifth in caused turnovers per game. That is a defense that wins a 9-3 game if the offense gives it a chance.
So what was missing against Duke?
A few things, and they are the things you cannot manufacture. Richmond did not get the May goalie performance the blueprint requires. They did not get a hot scorer dragging them through the back half of a bracket, though Aidan O’Neil broke the program single-season points record in the loss and Gavin Creo had four goals. They did not get the late-game possession discipline that turns a 12-9 fourth-quarter lead into a win against a top-five program. Those are the margins. Those are also exactly the margins that Loyola and Denver did get when their windows opened.
You can argue Richmond is one good senior class away. You can argue they have already arrived and just need the bounces.
You can also argue the sport itself has changed under them while they were building.
What Changed
Loyola won in 2012. Denver won in 2015. The transfer portal as a meaningful redistributive force did not exist in either of those years. NIL was years from being legal. Revenue sharing was a whiteboard concept. Both championship rosters were built the old way: recruit, develop, retain, fifth-year senior, championship game.
Look at the 2025 men’s lacrosse portal report and the direction of traffic is one-way. Vermont’s Henry Dodge, an America East faceoff specialist with a 71 percent win rate in 2025, transferred to Maryland. UMBC’s Trey Fleece, a developed defensive midfielder, transferred to Maryland. Two of Yale’s All-Ivy attackmen went to Ohio State and Maryland respectively. Colgate’s Connor brothers, both All-Americans, transferred together to Georgetown. Quinn Fitzsimmons from Colgate to Johns Hopkins. Aidan Murnane from Colgate to Virginia.
The pattern is brutal and unmistakable. Mid-majors and Ivies develop the player. The bluebloods buy the senior year.
This is not a criticism of the players. They are responding rationally to an open market that has more money, more visibility, and a clearer professional pathway at the top of the sport than at the middle. It is also not a criticism of the bluebloods. They are competing within the rules. It is simply a description of where the talent now flows in May of the senior season, which is precisely the talent that won Loyola and Denver their titles.
The Loyola 2012 roster included a fifth-year senior, Lusby, who had torn his ACL the year before and returned to set the tournament goals record. In 2026, a player with that profile is in the portal in June, talking to Maryland and Hopkins. He may or may not stay. The program that developed him through three years of injury rehab gets no compensation if he leaves, and limited tools to keep him if a collective is calling.
The New Ingredient
If the original blueprint had seven ingredients, the modern version needs an eighth: donor infrastructure capable of underwriting enough N.I.L. to keep a senior class intact through the spring of the title run.
This is the ingredient hardest to fake. Coaching pedigree you can hire. Recruiting pipelines you can build. Defense you can scheme. Goalies and hot scorers you can develop and pray for. A donor base capable of matching collective-level NIL for a scholarship-limited, non-football sport at a school without an ACC or Big Ten media check, that is a five-to-ten year cultural project, and a lot of mid-major athletic departments do not have a credible plan for it.
Richmond is better positioned than most. Robins Stadium drawing 6,805 for an NCAA first-round game tells you something real about community investment. The program has won. The eyeballs are on it. But Robins Stadium is not the Carrier Dome, Richmond is not Maryland, and the question of whether the Spiders can keep their senior class intact through the spring of 2027 is genuinely open.
It is also the question that determines whether the blueprint still works.
The Honest Read
Here is what I think is true, with the caveat that I would love to be wrong.
The Loyola and Denver blueprint is real, and Richmond has executed about as much of it as a program in its position can. The remaining ingredients (the May goalie, the hot scorer, the late-game possession win, the senior class retention) are partly chance and partly resource. The chance part has always been there. The resource part is new, and it is getting worse, not better.
Eleven years is not nothing. Eleven years is the longest gap between mid-major champions in the modern lacrosse era. The two champions prior to Loyola were Virginia and Duke. The two champions since Denver are Notre Dame and Cornell. Neither qualifies. The trend is in one direction.
Mid-majors can still get to a No. 4 seed. They can still host a first-round game in front of a record crowd. They can still take a Duke or a Cornell or a Maryland to the wire in May. What they cannot easily do anymore, and what is getting harder every cycle, is keep the version of themselves that beats Duke together long enough to do it three times in a row.
Chemotti said after the 2025 win over North Carolina that he hoped the result would show other programs to stay the course and that anything can happen. He is right that it can. He also remembers, because he was there in 2012, the version of college lacrosse where it actually did. The version we have now is a different game, played to different rules, and the door he has been trying to walk through is closing while he is still pushing on it.
The window is not shut yet. But it is closing fast, and Richmond may be the last credible mid-major positioned to slip through before it does.
