2023 D3 Men's Soccer National Perspective

[PaulNewman]

Opening Weekend Winners and Losers

Biggest Winners

Mary Washington, John Carroll, Calvin, St Thomas

Winners

Ohio Northern, Texas Lutheran, Christopher Newport, Franklin & Marshall, Rochester, Western CT, Denison, Lebanon Valley, Montclair St, CWRU, Wisc-Platteville, Chicago, GAC, UMass-Boston, Scranton, Oglethorpe, Capital, VWU, Widener, Caltech, Mary Hardin-Baylor, Geneseo St, Loras, Wartburg, DePauw, Rutgers-Camden, Mt Union, Redlands, Babson, Macalester, New Paltz St, Trinity (TX), Endicott


Biggest Losers

Kenyon, Willamette

Losers

Hopkins, Stevens, W&L, OWU, SLU, Hanover, Coast Guard, Skidmore, Otterbein, video streaming (in 2023)

[Freddyfud]

F&M another team using hockey assists for their stats. Double assist given on their game winning free kick that was sent far post then headed back across the net for someone else to finish 

Wonder if they also credit assists for winning PKs that are converted.  Maybe I'm old school, but that one bothers me.

[Ejay]

FYI NCAA RULE EXCERPTS RE ASSISTS (Looked it up b/c I saw 10.5.8 occur at a game this weekend):

10.5.2 If a scoring play consists of two consecutive passes without a defender gaining control of the ball, two assists may be awarded, provided the second player does not have to elude a defender to make the final pass. Both passes must have a direct influence on the outcome of a goal scored. If the second player needs to elude a defender before passing to the goal-scorer, credit only that assist.

10.5.5 A corner kick, throw-in or free kick leading to a goal each counts as a pass in awarding assists.

10.5.7 If an attacking player's shot hits a post or crossbar and bounces back into the field of play and, before a defender can touch the ball, another attacker shoots the ball into the goal, credit the player whose shot hit the post or crossbar with an assist.

10.5.8 If an attacking player shoots and the goalkeeper or defender blocks the shot but cannot control the ball, and a second attacking player immediately knocks the rebound in for a goal, credit the player who took the first shot with an assist.

Wow. Chalk this up to "you learn something new everyday" AND "those are some horsesht rules for awarding assists".

[SimpleCoach]

Am watching a number of games today... because thats what I do.

And I will say this.  University of Paywall will never be in my Top 25.  I think they are average at best.

SC.

[SierraFD3soccer]

Am watching a number of games today... because thats what I do.

And I will say this.  University of Paywall will never be in my Top 25.  I think they are average at best.

SC.

Sorry, but which is the Univ of Paywall?  Univ of Rochester? Memory is shot.

[Another Mom]

Yes, University of Rochester.

[Freddyfud]

F&M another team using hockey assists for their stats. Double assist given on their game winning free kick that was sent far post then headed back across the net for someone else to finish 

Wonder if they also credit assists for winning PKs that are converted.  Maybe I'm old school, but that one bothers me.

I missed the rules excerpt post from TNAggie when I posted this.  Following that lead I see 10.5.4 No assist is awarded on a penalty-kick goal.  Now I can rest knowing Fantasy Premier League hasn't poisoned the well. Yet. 

[TNAggie]

F&M another team using hockey assists for their stats. Double assist given on their game winning free kick that was sent far post then headed back across the net for someone else to finish 

Wonder if they also credit assists for winning PKs that are converted.  Maybe I'm old school, but that one bothers me.

I missed the rules excerpt post from TNAggie when I posted this.  Following that lead I see 10.5.4 No assist is awarded on a penalty-kick goal.  Now I can rest knowing Fantasy Premier League hasn't poisoned the well. Yet.

Agreed! No assist on PK goal makes sense (though our club team did track "PK goals created," which was an interesting stat to see).

[Gregory Sager]

Franklin & Marshall with a big time win over Stevens 2-1 on a last minute header off a corner.  Stevens went up first on great hold-up play by the forward, who dragged and turned a defender, creating space for a lateral pass to the onrushing Stevens shooter.  F&M then evened it up (somewhat against the run of play in the game overall) and it looked like it would stay that way, but F&M appeared to be energized by the home crowd and kept lumping the ball into the box whenever it had a chance and finally got a clean head to put a ball home.  The commentator for F&M said that Stevens didn't give up 2 goals in a single game all season last year, making F&M's goals all the more impressive.

F&M another team using hockey assists for their stats. Double assist given on their game winning free kick that was sent far post then headed back across the net for someone else to finish 

They're not "hockey assists," they're soccer assists. As TNAggie pointed out, the NCAA soccer rulebook says as much. Virtually identical language can be found in Section 5 of the NCAA Stats Manual for Soccer, except that it also includes hypothetical case studies to illustrate what should or shouldn't be credited as a two-assist goal.

No matter how clearly it's defined, it can still come down to the interpretation of the official scorer, so subjectivity sometimes seeps into how assists are assigned. I'm certainly not going to vouch for how F&M's official scorer, or the official scorer for any other game I didn't watch, assigns assists. I'm likewise not going to blame that scorer sight unseen, either.

All I'm saying is that the NCAA deems that two-assist goals are part of the game, and has done so for a very long time. (I'm not sure how long, and whether or not it predates the creation of the MLS in 1996; I know that the MLS has had two-assist goals from the beginning of the league.) I get that it's not a common stat to see in overseas soccer. Then again, we don't get into the "key pass" or "chance created" stats here the way that they do in England. But the point is that American versions of soccer have had secondary assists for decades. Therefore, they aren't hockey assists, they're soccer assists.

(By the way, hockey isn't the only other sport besides soccer where two different players can be credited with assists within the same sequence of play. Baseball has two-assist plays, too.)

[soccerpapa]

The 2 assist thing will always bug me.  Too much subjective interpretation left to the official scorer (usually for second assist).  I watched one game this weekend and saw some good goals - second assist were awarded on several goals which based on rules previously stated should not have been.   

[PaulNewman]

What exactly is underlying the gripe on assists?  Is there an implication that someone is benefitting inappropriately...like getting away with something?

[WUPHF]

I am good with the two assists rule, but it does make the job significantly more difficult (i.e. more difficult for student workers and volunteers) to do consistently.

[soccerpapa]

Not so much a gripe but why does there need to be 2 assists when it is not a soccer norm and open to subjectivity. 

Assists become a useless stat when there is subjectivity involved. 

[Kuiper]

Not so much a gripe but why does there need to be 2 assists when it is not a soccer norm and open to subjectivity. 

Assists become a useless stat when there is subjectivity involved.

Assists, whether first or second, ARE a useless stat, or at least they are so prone to being over and under-inclusive as to be a misleading measure of whether a player has vision and passing ability.  They leave out a ton of plays that help create a goal, like the striker who makes a move to drag a defender out of the play or the players who make great passes or dribbles in the build-up to the goal, as well as the passes that don't lead to goals because of poor strikers (which is why "chance creation" is viewed as a better metric of playmaking), and they include very simple passes that could not possibly have resulted in a goal without the brilliance of the striker or the error of the defender/GK, which is itself a deviation from the original, stricter, measure of an assist.

There's a reason why the IFAB doesn't specify criteria for measuring an "assist," meaning that leagues internationally use their own differing criteria.  FIFA didn't even unofficially track the stat until the 1986 World Cup and only tracked it for the first time officially in the 1994 World Cup in the US, which some attributed to the fact that statistics (like assists from the NBA or MLB) were popular in the US because of the nascent fantasy leagues (e.g., Rotisserie League baseball) and they were hoping to attract more American fans.  If it helps you ignore them, you can consider assists in soccer as anti-traditional pandering to Americans.

From a modern pro coach's perspective, assists are anachronisms from an era when you might want a proxy for which players are playmakers.  With film of every game available to coaches and more sophisticated "every touch" analytical tools that measure "goals added" by how each player's touch increases the goal creation chances, they are probably too deceiving to be relied on other than perhaps a signal to figure out who to look at more closely.

For post-season awards, D3 soccer is so regionally/league focused that coaches and voters should pay enough attention to games to look beyond mere assist numbers by the end of the season.  To the extent that assists and goals are used poorly during awards season, it's probably for defenders because they have so few goals and assists that a couple can give the edge to one defender over another by someone too busy/lazy to go back and watch their actual defending (of the player and not just the team and its goals against average) and the circumstances that led to the actual assist/goal.  Beyond that, if a kid gets a second assist and it makes them feel good about themselves, I don't see any harm at all.  No one is winning awards on second assists alone.

[Recon]

Great commentary and thoughts on the assist subject. Subjectivity, and especially differences in the way staff or officials award assists does seem to make the statistic less useful. Many programs just don't award two assists.   

10.5.5 A corner kick, throw-in or free kick leading to a goal each counts as a pass in awarding assists.

Clarifying question: On a long throw-in into the box, if the ball deflects off a defender first, but the offensive player gains immediate possession for a shot and goal, is the throw still awarded an assist? Or does it need to be bang-bang same team, or is that also subjective?  The rules seem to indicate yes, but that also appears to be highly subjective in both opinion and among official scorers.