Notre Dame Finishes 9th In Overall Fall Sports Competition
The end of the NCAA fall sports campaign in the 2019-20 Division I Learfield Directors’ Cup competition came with LSU defeating Clemson earlier this week in the College Football Playoff.
For the second year in a row, Notre Dame finished ninth in the fall standings by scoring 296.50 points in the first phase of the competition, with 157 different schools (including FCS football) tallying points. The second phase is the winter sports, and the third and final one is the spring competition.
The 296.50 points from the fall — with 100 the maximum a team can score from a national title — came from all six varsity sports the school offers:
• 70.5 points for a No. 8 finish in men’s cross country at the NCAA Championship. Led by sophomore All-American Dylan Jacobs, it was the highest finish by the men's harriers since 2005.
• 66 points for placing No. 11 in the Coaches poll (and No. 12 in the AP) in football with an 11-2 record. The only schools in the Directors’ Cup Standing to place higher in football were Penn State and Wisconsin.
• 60 points in women’s cross country with a No. 15 placement at the NCAA Championships. Anna Rohrer became the program's first four-time All-American for the women. Head coach Matt Sparks directed both the men and women.
• 50 points in women’s soccer for advancing to the second round of the NCAA Tournament before getting eliminated by South Carolina.
• 25 points in men’s soccer after getting upset in the first round of the NCAA Tournament by Wright State.
• 25 points in women’s volleyball, where it lost in the first round of the NCAA Tournament to UCLA.
Notre Dame did not score last year in volleyball and women’s soccer, but this year did in every fall sport. It does not have other fall sports included such as women's field hockey or men’s water polo, the latter where Stanford received 100 points as the national champion and the University of Pacific 90 points as the runner-up.
Each school can count its top-scoring 19 sports toward the final point total, but four of the sports have to be baseball, men’s and women’s basketball and volleyball.
The competition began in 1994, and the Stanford Cardinal has captured the Cup every school year since 1995.
Naturally, Stanford was easily at the top of the pack at the end of the fall with 594.50 points while Michigan was a distant second at 421.
The 15-team ACC, including Notre Dame, had outstanding representation with five schools among the top 11, eight in the top 15, and 10 among the first 27.
Notre Dame had a school-record three consecutive top-10 placements overall in 2013 (No. 9), 2014 (No. 3, the school’s best showing ever) and 2015 (No. 10).
However, with both women's basketball and men's hockey both struggling some so far, the winter sports might not accumulate as many points as they have in the past decade.
Here is the final Top 10 from the fall competition.
1. Stanford — 594.50
2. Michigan — 421.00
3. Washington — 345.00
4. Wisconsin — 338.00
5. BYU — 326.00
6. Virginia — 312.00
7. Penn State —312.00
8. Louisville —302.00
9. Notre Dame — 296.50
10. North Carolina —235.00
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