Quinnipiac in

Good thing they didn't admit Sacred Heart I guess, eh?

As for why Holy Cross is out, USCHO has been recycling without explaining this "same kind of resources ... according to sources" line, perhaps because they repurposed it from the New Haven Register.

>>> That contradicts an earlier report in the New Haven Register, which indicated that Holy Cross has been tenatively admitted pending a sufficient upgrade to its women's program. According to sources, Holy Cross is not willing at this time to commit the same kind of resources to its women's program as the men's.

(USCHO also keeps recycling a final paragraph from the Register that should this happen (Quinnipiac going into ECAC), it would make sports history as the first time Yale and nearby Quinnipiac play in hockey:

(>>> ... should Quinnipiac ultimately be admitted, it would mark the first time that Quinnipiac and current ECAC member Yale would compete in men's hockey. The two schools are just a handful of miles away from one another in Hamden, Conn., and New Haven, Conn., respectively.)

The more I think about it, the more worrisome it seems if the ECAC piles on the teams and the Ivy presidents stick with 29 games. So Quinnipiac plus Holy Cross would be a problem and even worse would be the team that comes after Holy Cross in order to have a "balanced" schedule.

Would the Ivy group vote for more games? Cornell would probably vote for more games if more ECAC teams came in. Dartmouth might go along because it's always winter up there. But one suspects Derek Bok, or whoever sits in his leather wingback chair these days, doesn't think a lot about the right number of games for his hockey team, Brown is too busy correcting instituational racism in the 1800s in Bruinland to worry about something played on a sheet of ice, and Princeton figures the more hockey games you have, the more hockey games you lose. Who knows if Penn and Columbia even vote.

It may have to be unanimous. We really don't know a thing about how the Ivies make these decisions.

So far, the ECAC has done nothing but replace UVM with QU (well, they haven't even done that, but it looks like they will). If the conference gets bigger, either it will split into divisions with an uneven number of games, again, or presumably the Ivies will expand their schedule.

If the ECAC grows by a bunch of teams, there's the specter of playing most but not all of your opponents, as in some of the major football conferences. (Big Ten, I believe.) So, say, Cornell plays the Ivies all of them and Mercyurst but not Quinnipiac or Holy Cross. If the two teams you don't play are the league doormats, maybe you finish fifth not fourth in the standings and it affects your playoff seed. Or you wind up tied for first along with a team with a softer schedule.

Doubt they'd do it that way. Far more likely is "2 intradivision, 1 interdivision." The reason opponents get skipped in football is there are so few games to play around with (and I agree that it's awful that OK and NE don't play every year).

In a 16 team ECAC with 2 divisions and a 2/1 schedule, Cornell would have 7*2 + 8 = 22 conference games, just like today.

If say all 5 applicants are eventually admitted to create the 16 team ECAC, then assuming the Ivies are a bloc, that might give the following structure:

Ivy

Cor/Prn
Yal/Qpc
Hvd/Drt
Brn/SH

Non-Ivy

Clk/SLU
Col/UC
Mst/Nia
HC/RPI

[Q]Greg Berge Wrote:

If say all 5 applicants are eventually admitted to create the 16 team ECAC, then assuming the Ivies are a bloc, that might give the following structure:
[/q]
Swell. If we can't entirely dump the cellar-dwellers, then the ECAC teams I want Cornell to be semi-permanently matched up with are, in order of preference:

Harvard
Clarkson
RPI
Colgate
SLU

with Qpc, HC, Nia, etc. thrown in there somewhere if they prove to have more commitment to building successful hockey programs than the remaining set of perpetual losers. The idea here is to have in-conference games against teams that might actually be good competition/TUC.

Even so, this is my dispreferred solution. Personally, I'd rather Noel/Schafer/et al. recognize that 6/8 schools doesn't make an Ivy championship, tell the ECAC to screw off, and jump ship to Hockey East so nearly all of our conference games would be against teams each of which might contend for the NCAA championship in almost any given year. This is the best route to a strong program, short of removing the 29-game limit and playing even more games against good opponents.

The bottom line: we need to stop playing games against crap teams that don't give our guys any practice for the NCAA's, and get them playing a full season of matchups that approximate what they'll see in the 2nd+ round of the NCAA tournament.

Cheers,
Kyle

Does the vote have to be unanimous among the 6 ivies that play hockey Div 1, or all the eight ivy league members?

Please ignore

anyone else wondering why the vote is taking so long....strange

Looks like it's official (finally)

(no article to link yet, just on the main page of uscho)