Four Top-12 Teams, One Win: Men's Soccer Had a Very Loud Monday

Robert R. Hermann Stadium is where men's college soccer keeps its history. Saint Louis has won ten national championships, more than any program in the sport, and the field carries the name of the benefactor whose name also sits on the trophy handed to the best player in the country every December. On Monday night the fourth-ranked Billikens hosted SMU on that field and lost 4-0. Not 1-0 on a deflection. Four-nil, at home, in August, to a team ranked eleven spots beneath them.

That was the loudest result of a night with plenty of competition for the job. Twenty-seven Division I matches reached full time between Monday afternoon and the small hours of Tuesday morning, and they produced 93 goals. That is 3.44 per match, which is the sound a sport makes before its defensive shape shows up for the semester. Six matches finished level. Nine had at least one team held scoreless. Both of those things are true of the same evening, which tells you roughly everything about late August.

Sort the slate by ranking and it gets worse for the people at the top. Eight ranked teams played and went 4-2-2 as a group, a line that reads survivable until you check the altitude. The five inside the top twelve — No. 3 Furman, No. 4 Saint Louis, No. 6 Maryland, No. 11 Virginia, No. 12 Akron — combined for one win, two losses and two draws. The two cleanest evenings in the poll belonged to No. 15 SMU and No. 16 High Point. Neither of them was at home.

High Point's was arguably the better trick. The Panthers walked into Klockner Stadium, the address of a Virginia program with seven national championships, and won 3-2. Charlottesville has been one of this sport's cathedrals for four decades, and a scheduled trip there used to be something a smaller program accepted as a favor and a paycheck. That arrangement is finished. High Point has been building a national profile for years, and pulling three goals out of Klockner is not a hot night getting lucky. It is what a program looks like when it decides the number beside its name is a floor.

Akron's evening was quieter and just as instructive: 0-0 with Army at FirstEnergy Stadium. The Zips won the 2010 national title with one of the most watchable teams the college game has produced this century, and they remain the program most likely to turn a midweek match into a passing clinic. Army came in and took a point out of the building anyway. Under the current regular-season format there is no overtime, so a scoreless draw in August simply ends, gets filed, and follows both teams into the selection math that decides brackets in November. That math has no idea it was a warm night in Ohio.

Furman did the same thing on its own grass, drawing UNC Asheville 1-1 at Eugene Stone Soccer Stadium, which for the third-ranked team in the country is points left in the parking lot against a neighbor. West Virginia beat St. Bonaventure 1-0 at Dick Dlesk Soccer Stadium, the sort of result the Mountaineers will happily bank without watching the film twice. And Maryland, whose three national championships span 1968 to 2008, beat New Haven 3-2 at Ludwig Field. That was the only top-twelve win of the night, and it took ninety minutes and a two-goal cushion that did not stay two.

The unranked half of the card was better theater anyway. Memphis beat North Carolina 3-2, which means a Tar Heels program with two championships this century lost a five-goal game in Tennessee. Louisville went into Kentucky's Wendell and Vickie Bell Soccer Complex and won 3-2, which is the only version of that rivalry anybody quotes back to you the next morning. Ohio State beat DePaul 6-0 at Jesse Owens Memorial Stadium; six is a number most teams wait until October to see, and the Buckeyes had it before Labor Day.

Elsewhere the scorelines read like transcription errors. Old Dominion beat Elon 5-3. Longwood beat Coastal Carolina 4-2. South Carolina put four past South Carolina Upstate without conceding. Quinnipiac edged Providence 3-2, Fairleigh Dickinson won 2-1 at La Salle, and Villanova ground out a 1-0 over Saint Peter's that will matter to exactly one coaching staff and matter a lot. UCLA, four national championships in the case, drew 1-1 at home with Cal State Bakersfield in the last match to finish anywhere in the country.

One number frames the whole slate: home teams went 16-5-6. That is not officiating or altitude, it is the shape of the August calendar. Programs with budgets buy home dates early, guarantee games get played in the bigger stadium, and travel in the first two weeks of a college soccer season is genuinely punishing — bus rides, Monday classes, a Thursday match already on the board before the bags are unpacked. Which is precisely why SMU's four goals in St. Louis and High Point's three in Charlottesville deserve the size of type they are getting.

The honest caveat is the calendar itself. Rosters turn over harder in this sport than in almost any other on campus; the international pipeline reshuffles every summer, and a team that lost four starters in the spring is effectively a new club wearing an old name. Fitness is uneven in week two. Set-piece organization is a construction project at nearly every level. The teams that look untouchable right now are frequently the ones with the most returning minutes rather than the most talent, and that edge compresses a little every week until it disappears in October.

So the top 25 will churn, and it should. What Monday established is narrower and more useful than a poll shuffle: the distance between the fourth-best team in the country and the fifteenth is currently indistinguishable from noise, and the distance between eleventh and sixteenth is apparently negative. In a sport whose postseason is a single-elimination bracket where one bad ninety minutes ends everything, that is not a crisis. It is the entire premise. Nobody schedules their way to safety here. They just find out earlier than they wanted to.

Tuesday keeps the experiment running. No. 10 Bryant visits Rhode Island, No. 25 Kansas City hosts UNLV, Bellarmine goes to Xavier, and Georgia State travels to UAB. Four more chances for the numbers next to the names to mean less at midnight than they did at noon.