Boston College Sets School Record With Score In 2015-16 Directors Cup

Boston College shattered a program record with 482 points in the 2015-16 NACDA Learfield Directors Cup, finishing 48th in the final standings.

BC’s previous high point total in the annual ranking of athletic programs, which dates back to 1993-94, was 363 points in 2011-12, when BC finished 60th. Other high scores in BC history were 355 in 2006-07, 351 in 2005-06, and 354.5 in 2000-1. In 2014-15, BC had one of their weakest performance with 275 points.

Stanford won the Directors Cup, as they do seemingly every year. UNC was the highest-ranked ACC team at #7; the only ACC schools to not finish in the Top 50 were Wake Forest (#68), Georgia Tech (#80) and Pitt (#110).

The ranking system for the Directors Cup is fairly flawed, and few outside the world of athletics administrators put too much stock in it, but it’s one of the only methods that tries to measure a cross-section of the success of an entire athletics program over the course of an academic year.

Points are accrued by up to 20 teams (a school’s top-10 men’s and top-10 women’s teams) over the course of the year based exclusively on qualifying for and advancing through the NCAA tournament, with the exception of FBS football which awards points based on the final USA Today Top 25 Poll as well as smaller point totals for bowl wins and appearances.

The point values for a team’s finish are scaled based on the size of the field; i.e., making the 26-team women’s lacrosse tournament and going out in the second round is worth fewer points than making the sweet 16 of the 64-team women’s soccer tournament.

This year, BC registered points from the following teams:

Women’s Hockey - 2nd place, 90 points
Men’s Hockey - 3rd place, 83 points
Men’s Soccer - 5th place, 73 points
Baseball - 9th place, 64 points
Field Hockey - 5th place, 60 points
Fencing - 20th place, 34 points
Women’s Cross Country - 32nd place, 28 points
Women’s Soccer - 33rd place, 25 points
Women’s Lacrosse - 17th place, 25 points

As you can probably tell from the scoring, BC tends to start out stronger in the Cup and then fade as sports pile up that the school doesn’t compete in. BC was 26th after the fall standings, 38th after the winter and 48th in the final ranking. Despite BC having a pretty good-sized athletic department in terms of number of teams, there are a number of sports like water polo, beach volleyball, men's lacrosse, men's and women's gymnastics, rifle, and wrestling that the Directors Cup’s top teams often score points in.

BC has some room for growth over this year’s finish, though not a ton; football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball are the big missing links that are capable of scoring points for BC in the Directors Cup.

As I said earlier, I don’t really think the scoring method is the best, and it tends to reward sheer quantity over quality. It also ignores things like conference championship performance or regular season record. That said, this high score in the Directors Cup is a positive reflection on the amount of BC teams that earned their way in to the national tournament this past season.