As for the Bulldogs, they will enter the finals against UVA as fairly heavy favorites, according to the Lax-ELO projections. And the stats underscore why.

Where Penn State largely played to their profile in this one, the bad news for Tambroni’s squad is that for some reason, the Yale offense looked a lot like Penn State in this game. Their shooting percentage was way up, resulting in an efficiency improvement of roughly 8 percentage points. Across a game with 50 possessions, that works out to…4 extra goals. Interesting.

Note the shots/possession number too; Yale’s went down for the right reason. They made a lot of shots, which is naturally going too bring down the shots/poss figure. As we have noted, more is generally better in this metric, but when your figure is slightly below your average because of a higher shooting percentage, that is when teams see the largest winning percentage boost.

An interesting nugget: Yale’s time-to-first-shot duration was 33.4 seconds, compared to a season average of 33.2. Eerie. That tells me that despite the appearance of a shock-and-awe campaign in the first half, Yale largely played their same style. It just worked better in this game.