LAX: Cornell 8 Dartmouth 7 Final

Or not really caring about athletics enough to come up with a realistic tiebreaker - that's an Ivy thing.

Hey, it's better than the way the Big 10 used to decide who to send to the Rose Bowl when teams tied for the conference championship in football. If there was a two or three-way tie, they'd send whoever had waited the longest since their last Rose Bowl appearance.

While I don't necessarily disagree with you Jeff, it seems like good tiebreakers are hard to come up with when you have a seven game schedule. Let me rephrase that. You can come up with plenty of valid criteria (goals margin, margin in H2H, record against top 4, etc.) but there's not a very large sample size. Using RPI means using out of conference games, which strikes me as the wrong approach when deciding the conference title (even if it's not strictly the title, just the AQ). Goals margin H2H isn't much less random as a coin flip in a three way tie like we've discussed. Record against Top 4, like the ECAC uses, devolves to record against #4 in this case. My point is not to say that a coin flip is wonderfully fair. It's just not as horrible as it might seem at first glance.

Presumably they'd do something like drawing straws with an odd number of teams. But maybe not. You could do something goofy like "who can pick more coins right out of 10 tries" with sudden death if needed after that.

That actually makes a lot of sense for the conference as a whole (publicity for more teams)...and is at least easily predictable. Not fair to the players, though.

While goal diff may very possibly be nearly as random as a coin flip, at least it relates to something that actually happened *on the field*, as opposed to the wind and a thumb motion of an official.

As far as the 3-way "coin flip" goes, if I remember correct from the 3 way Cornell/Dartmouth/Princeton tie a couple years back, I'm pretty sure they just used a random number generator or something of the sort. So that would change my previous statement to "as opposed to the motion of certain electrons."

A 3 way actual coin flip wouldn't be too hard to do though. Just flip two coins (either simultaneously or sequentially) and make H,H Cornell, H, T Dartmouth, T, H Princeton, and T, T redo or such. 1/3rd chance each way around. Of course, they'd probably just do the random number generator cause then you can't blame human bias/poor flips. And concerns about imperfections in random # generators are probably above the level of athletes/coaches, even of the Ivy variety.

[Q]DeltaOne81 Wrote:

While goal diff may very possibly be nearly as random as a coin flip, at least it relates to something that actually happened *on the field*, as opposed to the wind and a thumb motion of an official.

As far as the 3-way "coin flip" goes, if I remember correct from the 3 way Cornell/Dartmouth/Princeton tie a couple years back, I'm pretty sure they just used a random number generator or something of the sort. So that would change my previous statement to "as opposed to the motion of certain electrons."
[/Q]

Well, most random-number generators are actually pseudo-random, so it's probably more like "as opposed to the nth decimal place of a certail logarithm."

[Q]DeltaOne81 Wrote:
A 3 way actual coin flip wouldn't be too hard to do though. Just flip two coins (either simultaneously or sequentially) and make H,H Cornell, H, T Dartmouth, T, H Princeton, and T, T redo or such. 1/3rd chance each way around. Of course, they'd probably just do the random number generator cause then you can't blame human bias/poor flips. And concerns about imperfections in random # generators are probably above the level of athletes/coaches, even of the Ivy variety.[/q]

Or you could roll a d6 and assign 1 and 4 to Cornell, 2 and 5 to Dartmouth, and 3 and 6 to Princeton. No redos necessary. (When I get unbreakable ties in my ECAC tiebreaker stuff, I just go by alphabetical order, but I don't imagine the coaches would go for that.)

[Q]jtwcornell91 Wrote:

(When I get unbreakable ties in my ECAC tiebreaker stuff, I just go by alphabetical order, but I don't imagine the coaches would go for that.)[/q]

I'd go for it as long as Brown and Columbia weren't involved

[Q]Hillel Hoffmann Wrote:

Hey, it's better than the way the Big 10 used to decide who to send to the Rose Bowl when teams tied for the conference championship in football. If there was a two or three-way tie, they'd send whoever had waited the longest since their last Rose Bowl appearance.[/q]

Whoa, not so fast... In '73, tOSU and UM had identical conference records and shared the Big Ten Title. Ohio State went to the Rose Bowl. The following season, the scenario was identical, with Ohio State tying Michigan in the annual grudge match. The Big Ten Commissioners voted to send Ohio State to the Rose Bowl again. The vote was apparently influenced by news that Michigan quarterback Denny Franklin had broken his collarbone in the tOSU game and would be unlikely to play in Pasadena.

The folks in Ann Arbor handled this one about as well as Cornell hockey fans did when the team was sent to the Twin Cities this year. It was a particularly bitter pill, because in those days, due to contractual relations with the Rose Bowl, everyone else in the Big Ten and Pac Ten stayed home.

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