What's with the poor out of conference schedule?

Mostly it boils down to: If North Dakota or Minnesota wants to schedule an early season game against an ECAC team, the last team you'd want to invite is Cornell. Too risky. Even in an off year, Cornell can rise up and bite you.

Same reason UCLA or Kentucky or Texas would be disinclined to schedule a game against Princeton in basketball if it could be avoided.

[q]Mostly it boils down to: If North Dakota or Minnesota wants to schedule an early season game against an ECAC team, the last team you'd want to invite is Cornell. Too risky. Even in an off year, Cornell can rise up and bite you.

Same reason UCLA or Kentucky or Texas would be disinclined to schedule a game against Princeton in basketball if it could be avoided. [/q]
I don't buy that argument at all. North Dakota opens next season with two games at Maine. Michigan plays at BU and UNH in their first two weekends. Berenson and Blais were certainly not thinking "I want an easy game to start the season with" when they scheduled these contests. They were thinking "we want to play top programs from beginning to end."

I don't think it matters that these are HEA teams either (btw - UM plays SLU right after UNH). Top teams want to play top teams, simple as that. There isn't the schedule padding mentality in college hockey the way there is in squeakball. If there was, then the better AH/MAAC teams would have had a really easy time getting games with top Big-4 programs. (Remember beating the MAAC leader often helped RPI/PWR to a vastly unreasonable extent as measured by KRACH).

What kills Cornell is the Ivy games and schedule length limit. When you only have 7 games to work with and can't play in October it's going to be hard to schedule a lot of top programs, no matter how well you do. There's just not much flexibility in the Ivy schedule. The fact that Colgate is the only nearby school that you could reasonably do a weekend pair with makes it a little more difficult.

[Q]KeithK Wrote:
I don't buy that argument at all. North Dakota opens next season with two games at Maine. Michigan plays at BU and UNH in their first two weekends. Berenson and Blais were certainly not thinking "I want an easy game to start the season with" when they scheduled these contests. They were thinking "we want to play top programs from beginning to end."[/q]Right, but the point is, scheduling is like need-based financial aid: It's the people in the middle who get screwed. North Dakota is happy to play a power like Maine, who'll almost certainly wind up with a good winning percentage and thus won't hurt their RPI too much even if they lose a game. And they're happy to play a cupcake like Canisius, because while the low winning percentage won't help your RPI, it's pretty much a guaranteed win and a stat-padding night for Brandon Bochenski on top of it. But when you play Cornell, there's the risk that we'll beat you, because we're likely better than Canisius, and there's also the chance that 04-05 Cornell will be like 99-00 Cornell and hurt your RPI with a low winning percentage, and on top of that, because we don't usually play shootouts, you get no stat padding.

I don't buy the airport argument, though. You can't tell me that whatever airport serves Potsdam and Canton (or, for that matter, Burlington) is any better than Ithaca.

[Q]jmh30 Wrote:I don't buy the airport argument, though. You can't tell me that whatever airport serves Potsdam and Canton (or, for that matter, Burlington) is any better than Ithaca.[/q]

The Canton winter airport is excellent for those 3-4 months when there's a complete freezover from the US side to the Canadian side and no shipping.

When I cited the airport issues as a negative for Cornell I was thinking more that if you play a Massachusetts, Connecticut, or Rhode Island school, you've got real airports you can fly into and backups you can fly into. I suppose Syracuse counts as a fairly real airport, or Rochester, for Cornell.

I agree. On top of that Lynah Rink (throwing out last year) gives Cornell a great home ice advantage which gives Cornell a better chance of laying an PWR hurting loss on a powerhouse team. The capacity of Lynah and especially air access to Ithaca are highly overblown issues IMHO of Cornell's lack of ability to draw WCHA teams. Otherwise Clarkson and St. Lawrence would have the same trouble bringing them in. Then again, I have no idea how hard we try to set up home and home arragements with WCHA teams. Anyone have any insight?

As has been noted, these teams play tough games early in the season, and are not afraid to play tough games. The issue is more what was also noted above -- the Ivies can't play in October, when most of these games take place. By November, the WCHA teams especially are well into their league schedule. I don't think the explanation needs to go much beyond that.

Theoretically there could be time in December after exams for a game with a WCHA team, but the days before Christmas aren't prime times for hockey watching, and that window of a week - actually less - is when players can go home to see their families. Already for the Everblades, some players in BC have to return east or south on Christmas Day. That kind of sucks if you think of hockey players as people with families and proud grandparents and girlfriends back home, not just red jerseys with numbers on them.