When I graduated from Princeton University in 2010, there was a strong feeling on campus that the school’s once dominant men’s lacrosse program was being left behind. Hall of Fame coach Bill Tierney had unexpectedly left for upstart Denver, and it had been six years since the team’s last semifinals appearance. The next year the Tigers won just four games for the first time since the 1980s.
If you’d asked me back then if Princeton would ever win another men’s lacrosse national title, I probably would have said no. The sport was expanding westward and far richer athletic departments were pushing resources into an endeavor they had previously left to a handful of bluebloods and elite Northeast private schools. College lacrosse was having a moment nationally, and it seemed only a matter of time until it looked more like football or men’s basketball, dominated by the wealthiest programs in the wealthiest conferences.
And for a while that thesis held. Princeton went to just one NCAA tournament from 2011-2021, after playing in 19 of the previous 21. In that dry spell, Michigan’s program transitioned from club to Division I in 2012, and the Big Ten formally added the sport in 2015. Penn State made its first semifinals in 2019, the same year Utah became the first Pac-12 school with a D-I men’s team. In 2020, Princeton attackman Michael Sowers, perhaps the best player in the country, was forced to transfer to another school (he chose Duke) because of the Ivy League’s rules against post-grad seasons.
Then everything changed. Princeton went back to the NCAA tournament in 2022 and has qualified every year since. On Monday, the Tigers won their first NCAA title since 2001, scoring 11 unanswered goals in a dominant 16-9 win over Notre Dame.
So what happened? In a hyper-local view, a new coach recruited the program back to excellence. But there are national forces at work too. The new era of college athlete compensation has upended the way the richest athletic departments spend and what they prioritize. And it appears to have stunted some of the changes underway in men’s lacrosse.
Fifteen years ago, schools such as Ohio State and Michigan were swimming in money, dedicating most of it to football and basketball with plenty left over for other programs. Now most additional revenue is being redirected to athletes in just a handful of sports. Schools have blown past the $20.5 million revenue sharing cap put in place a year ago. Some institutions encourage potential donors to redirect money through other channels where it can more effectively benefit football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball stars. According to data that Opendorse released last year, about 92.5% of revenue sharing payments at Power Four schools are going to players on those three rosters.
That’s opened the door for smaller schools, in smaller sports, to maintain an edge. The Cornell men’s lacrosse story is similar to Princeton’s. The once dominant program had some lean years in the 2010s, then stormed back more recently, winning the national title last season. Johns Hopkins has been to three of the last four quarterfinals. It’s particularly helpful, of course, if your endowments look like Princeton’s (about $36 billion), Johns Hopkins’ (about $13 billion) or Cornell’s (about $12 billion).
As a result, the highest tier of men’s lacrosse currently looks very similar to how it looked 15 years ago, dominated by the relatively small handful of schools that have always cared about it. This year’s Final Four was Princeton, Notre Dame, Syracuse and Duke, four of the seven most successful programs of the early 2000s.
It’s a lesson for any smaller school that’s been historically dominant in any niche sport: Just because the richer universities could dominate your sport, that doesn’t mean they’ll throw big bucks at it to try. And it’s true now more than ever.
To be sure, there have been changes in men’s lacrosse that may be more permanent. Private schools that don’t have billon-dollar endowments have struggled to maintain their excellence. Hofstra, for example, hasn’t been to an NCAA tournament since 2011, and Loyola has been to just one in the past seven years.
And there’s some evidence that the big spenders are flexing their financial heft. According to data schools submit annually to the U.S. Department of Education, five of men’s lacrosse’s 10 highest spending programs during the 2010 season didn’t have an FBS football team. By 2025, there were just two.
That said, the thesis has held up in NCAA men’s ice hockey, another sport that is expanding its footprint (see Arizona State) and garnering the attention of big college programs (see Penn State), all while the talent level increases dramatically. It’s been 14 years—Boston College in 2012—since a school with a Power Four football team won a men’s ice hockey title. In the prior 14 years, there were titles from Boston College (3x), Minnesota (2x), Michigan State, Wisconsin and Michigan.
In women’s lacrosse, the numbers—in spending and on-field success—skew way more heavily toward the Power Four schools, likely a product of earlier investment and Title IX considerations. But in men’s soccer, Vermont has recently emerged as a dominant program; in baseball, Southern Miss has played in 10 straight NCAA tournaments, with two regional titles in the past five years.
After Princeton’s win on Monday, head coach Matt Madalon talked about walking past the program’s six prior national championship trophies in his office every day.
“It reminds us we’re at a place where it can be done,” he said.
