Pro-KRACH article by Wodon

[www.uscho.com]

Kudos to Adam

Ditto.

Good article. I think now that you got USCHO a new picture of Schafer, you should get them a new picture of Adam.

If there's still doubt in anyone's mind, Friday night's results and their effect on the ranking systems speak volumes. Maine lost to BU, Cornell beat Princeton.

RPI             Maine     CU    Delta
Pre 2/28        .5949   .5947   .0002
Post 2/28       .5912   .5895   .0017
Change         -.0037  -.0052  +.0015

KRACH RRWP
Pre 2/28        .8335   .8310   .0025
Post 2/28       .8221   .8313  -.0092 	
Change         -.0114   .0003  -.0117

So, using RPI, a victory over a weak team penalizes Cornell more than a loss penalizes Maine. Not to take anything away from BU, but that just shouldn't happen. Looking at the KRACH numbers, however, shows that the win increases our rating very slightly...what one would expect by beating a weak team. KRACH properly rewards wins or penalizes losses intuitively, according to the strength of your opponent.

RPI should be replaced with a KRACH system.

Note: credit JTW for also presenting this same argument on Hockey-L.

Is it impossible to drop in KRACH after a win?

Hypothetical: Cornell beats a bad non-conference team (say, UAA or Findlay) and the rest of the ECAC (who for the purpose of the hypothetical made up the rest of Cornell's schedule to that point) lose to non-ECAC teams. Could the effect on Cornell's SOS outweigh the meager benefit from a win over a bad team?

It is impossible to drop in KRACH RRWP as a result of a win. Of course, if there are other games at the same time, it may affect your strength of schedule adversely enough to cause a net drop, especially if your win does little to improve your KRACH.

I haven't done it, but I'm sure if you play with [slack.net] you will find that Cornell's drop in RPI can be attributed to the win over Princeton, and if you eliminate that game, we would have passed Maine.

Yup, by simply eliminating the Princeton game from Friday, our RPI shoots up to 0.5977, a good 0.0036 over Maine.

Hey John, can I get a clarification. As KRACH becomes (hopefully) a tool that more and more of the masses know about thanks to articles like this and USCHO carrying it, I want to know that I'm pronouncing it correctly. Is it pronounced CRACK just like the KROCH Library at Cornell is pronounced CROCK or is it pronounced CRASH. The topic came up at dinner before the Princeton game and I think the answer was CROCK but just want to clarify. Wouldn't want to add bad pronunciation to elongated prose on my list of oral and written flaws.

I've always pronounced KRACH as if it rhymed with "scratch" so I am curious about the answer to this question also.

BigRed Apple wrote:

I've always pronounced KRACH as if it rhymed with "scratch" so I am curious about the answer to this question also.

That's the way I've always said it, since that way it's not a homophone for crock or crotch or crack. I can't recall if Ken Butler said it out loud when I met him; we probably just called it "Bradley-Terry".