Should men’s lacrosse fans be thanking face-off specialist Bryn Holmes for the team’s season opening victory?
Senior Bryn Holmes won his first six faceoffs in the first half and 11-of-16 overall against unranked Bellarmine (in Louisville, Ky., in case you, like me, had never heard of the school before). The impressive stat allowed the No. 8 Terps to keep the ball in their possession and helped them to a 12-7 win.
“I think there’s some crazy statistic about if you win over a certain percentage (of face-offs), that a majority of the time you’re going to win the game,” Holmes said.
After searching high and low, I couldn’t find that statistic on the Web. (And if it’s not online, how can it exist?) But though I couldn’t find the statistical correlation between victories and face-off win percentage, it certainly seems plausible.
Holmes plans to test that theory this season. He won 64.7 percent of face-offs Saturday, a nine-point improvement over the 55.8 he had to end last year, which ranked No. 15 in the nation, just eight percent behind the national leader.
Of course, the small sample size so far cannot compare to his 233 plays from the ‘X’ last season against superior opponents. He will need to do even better in the Terps’ first top-20 match-up against Georgetown this weekend.
“I’m definitely going to focus even more on face-offs this week and see if we can do even better than we did last week.”
But he can’t do it all on his own, no matter what the percentages say. Every face-off man needs teammates on the wings waiting to grab possession of the ball. But coach Dave Cottle said that’s exactly what the Terps failed to do Sunday.
“We didn’t win on ground balls,” Cottle said. “We didn’t play as well on the wing as we can. I thought Danny Halayko did a better job, with two ground balls on the wing. But I just think we’re looking for a little more consistency from our wing play. That’s an area we have to get better at.”
Kate Yanchulis is the Terrapin men’s lacrosse team beat writer for The Diamondback . She can be reached at kyanchulisdbk@gmail.com.