Harvard(sucks) @ Lynah

Word has it (from a University source) that Harvard(sucks) has submitted a petition to the NCAA requesting that they not have to play at Lynah Rink. They have apparently cited "unsafe playing conditions" and an "unfair advantage" as their grounds for this petition (not likely to be granted for this season). This is the first time I've heard of such a thing, can anyone say if this is past practice or is Harvard(sucks) just acting like harvard(sucks).

Wha??

Sissies.

Hah! Not like Lynah East provides them with a more home crowd advantage. What wimps...

No word of this that I can find on USCHO or elsewhere...does anybody have a report or an independent source on this? I find it difficult to believe, even though I never would have predicted a lot of what's already happened in this young season.

Beeeej

Maybe Harvard is mad about the HockeyCam too?

Beeeej,

My source heard of the petition mid last week. . .it may be too new for most others to have heard about. Who knows???

^^ LOL Felix.

This seems really bizarre and unlikely to me. But hey, I guess that's Hahvahd for you.

"Unfair advantage"? Isn't that the point of home ice? I guess Harvard wouldn't understand that.

Don't they realize that no matter where they "move" this game to, it's still going to be a hostile and "unfair" environment? Isn't it already abudently clear to them that the Lynah Faithful travel? Harvard, of all teams, should know this.

think we all know that this is buzzzzzzzzzzzzz. but it is funny to think about

If the rumor is true, I'd welcome a move of venue to the Bay Area. That way, I won't have to travel cross-country to hear for my beloved Big Red team. I dare say the rest of you WILL make the trek to Lynah West...)

How about reclaiming the New Orleans Arena from those damned Hornets? Lynah South in the Big Easy!

Maybe we could do what Michigan did and play it in the football stadium. Then the athletic department could get what they always wanted...a Schoellkopf Sellout!

I've heard the petition also include the fact that Harvard wants all of their wins to be referred to "with honors"

And I'd think they should get a "W" just for showing up...

Tom Tseng wrote:
[Q]If the rumor is true, I'd welcome a move of venue to the Bay Area. That way, I won't have to travel cross-country to hear for my beloved Big Red team. I dare say the rest of you WILL make the trek to Lynah West...) [/Q]
and John T. Whelan '91 wrote:
[Q]How about reclaiming the New Orleans Arena from those damned Hornets? Lynah South in the Big Easy![/Q]

Tom, John, if you guys are willing to put me and my three thousand closest friends up for the night, we'd love to drive out to your respective venues.

How about: if Harvard feels that they shouldn't have to play at Lynah, they can forfeit the game. Yeah, we have an advantage over them but it's definitely not an unfair one. Forfeiting ought to make them look really good in their media.

[q]Yeah, we have an advantage over them but it's definitely not an unfair one.[/q]

It certainly is. But that's what makes it so much fun

But forfeits are omitted from NCAA selection criteria calculations, so we're better off if we beat them on the ice.

Not if they keep losing

It's not that bad yet; Hahvahd is 6th in the nation according to RPI and the 16th toughest opponent according to RPI's strength-of-schedule measure. OTOH, playing UVM will lower our RPI whether we win or lose. But that's not just a result of the new RPI formula; things are kind of screwy when you're unbeaten and untied. For example, our KRACH is infinite right now (along with Hahvahd's and Brown's, although Hahvhahd's infinity is inifinitely smaller than Brown's ), so beating UVM wouldn't help that either.

That was a joke

Hey, don't discuss your KRACH here, there are kids in the room!

Where can I look up the current RPI, PWR, KRACH, etc. standings? Last I checked, neither JTW's page nor USCHO has started posting them.

Not enough games played to compile them yet.

Seriously, any idea when they start posting the statistical standings?

Am I the only person who is going to publicly state that I don't believe for a second that this is true?

USCHO begins publishing PWR usually in early January.

I'll boldly state on this forum that I agree with you, Big Red Apple.

I'm not sure about this, but i think that Harvard's beef has less to do with the fact that we have a home ice advantage and more to do with the fact that a player on their team got hit in the face by a piece of fish.

I'm all for the tradition, don't get me wrong, but honestly that just sucks.

Fish on the ice around the players = OK
Fish in the face of an opponent, no matter how hated = disrespectful

These guys have to then go out there and play 60 minutes of hockey, maybe with the stench of a little fish wedged somewhere in their jersey.

Sounds like it sucks.

Seems unlikely. Still good for a chuckle though .

"One of the guys", if I remember from last year, it didn't happen 'til mid-winter (like, January). Isn't it true (based on the deaming of the NCAA statistical lords), that RPI (the stat, not the school) isn't valid until everyone has played 20 games? And if RPI isn't, then PWR isn't.

Thinking of it now, 20 seems like too many, but it's some number like that - I shall search USCHO for the answer, which is where I believe I found it once.

-Fred

I think it is very possible that Harvard could have filed a petition with the NCAA. I would not discredit the source information just yet. I don’t think that Harvard or Cornell will publicly make a big deal over Lynah. It really does not look good for either school to have this sort of thing in the press, if you know what I mean.

They're not terribly meaningful so early in the season, but I am ready to calculate them as an academic exercise, and have done so already. But until everybody has a winning percentage which is neither .000 or 1.000, you can't assign everyone a finite KRACH on the same scale, which makes the presentation of the results complicated. Once Cornell and Brown have both tied or lost (and not just tied each other, but that's another story) and Princeton and Huntsville have both won or tied, I'll start posting the RPI, PWR, and KRACH on [slack.net]

DeltaOne81 '03 wrote:

"One of the guys", if I remember from last year, it didn't happen 'til mid-winter (like, January). Isn't it true (based on the deaming of the NCAA statistical lords), that RPI (the stat, not the school) isn't valid until everyone has played 20 games? And if RPI isn't, then PWR isn't.

RPI is defined as long as everyone has played at least two different opponents. What you're probably thinking of is the requirement that a team play 20 games to be considered in tournament selection at all.

John: what happens if a team goes undefeated/untied or fails to win or tie a single game?

John T. Whelan '91 wrote:

DeltaOne81 '03 wrote:

"One of the guys", if I remember from last year, it didn't happen 'til mid-winter (like, January). Isn't it true (based on the deaming of the NCAA statistical lords), that RPI (the stat, not the school) isn't valid until everyone has played 20 games? And if RPI isn't, then PWR isn't.

RPI is defined as long as everyone has played at least two different opponents. What you're probably thinking of is the requirement that a team play 20 games to be considered in tournament selection at all.

Didn't the L16 component of the PWR use to be Last twenty? Maybe Fred is thinking of that?

John E Hayes '98 '00 wrote:

Didn't the L16 component of the PWR use to be Last twenty?

Yes, that used to coincide nicely with the minimum number of games (although it still didn't work out that way because independents like Air Force and Army would often play a bunch of games against Division I but at the time still ineligible teams like Canisius, which counted towards the 20-game minimum but not towards tournament selection).

Of course, the "last 16" criterion is now a thing of the past.

The KRACH doesn't actually matter for anything does it? I seem to remember a fews years ago Alabama-Huntsville leading the KRACH fairly deep into the season.

[Q]Of course, the "last 16" criterion is now a thing of the past.[/Q]
Um, is it? I thought that was the one they left alone. They had talked about altering or eliminating it, but they haven't yet.

Also, it's possible that I pulled the number 20 from the "20 min games" thing (not the last 20 games though, I haven't been around college hockey long enough). So is it possible USCHO doesn't post their stats until people start meeting this? Or is it just some randomly determined point in the winter? Maybe out very own Adam W can shed some light on that.

Either way, I know USCHO takes its sweet time to put up the statistical rankings. That's what we have JTW for ... among other things of course.

-Fred

Graham Meli '02 wrote:

The KRACH doesn't actually matter for anything does it? I seem to remember a fews years ago Alabama-Huntsville leading the KRACH fairly deep into the season.

The KRACH is not used in the selection process. We keep mentioning it because it does far more robustly what the RPI was designed to do: evaluate a team's won-lost-tied record in light of its strength of schedule. Assumung your definition of "fairly deep into the season" means sometime after the beginning of the calendar year, I can recall no such anomaly in the KRACH, as opposed to the RPI, which had Quinnipiac at #12 at the end of the 1999 season and #11 at the end of the 2000 season.

DeltaOne81 '03 wrote:

[Q]Of course, the "last 16" criterion is now a thing of the past.[/Q]
Um, is it? I thought that was the one they left alone. They had talked about altering or eliminating it, but they haven't yet.

After far too much searching, I found the article:

[www.uscho.com]

Last 16 was dropped, the RPI weightings were switched back to 25/50/25, and "Team Under Consideration" was redefined to be anyone with an RPI of .500 or above.

Yeah, I don't remember exactly how far into the season the Alabama-Huntsville thing was (perhaps it was before any games had been played and the teams were just listed alphabetically). I think it was at least a few weeks in, which would be fairly insignificant, but still strange. Then again, maybe I dreamed all of this...

Graham Meli '02 wrote:

Yeah, I don't remember exactly how far into the season the Alabama-Huntsville thing was (perhaps it was before any games had been played and the teams were just listed alphabetically). I think it was at least a few weeks in, which would be fairly insignificant, but still strange. Then again, maybe I dreamed all of this...

It was in November 2001, when UAH started out 9-1, with their only loss coming to 8-1-2 Western Michigan. At that point, UAH was #1 in the KRACH and #3 in the RPI. Then they started losing and dropped off the map.

So the strange thing was UAH's strong start, not the fact that KRACH (like other rating systems) judged them accordingly.

I think that should be November 2000. When I saw 9-1, I immediately thought, "they'd (UAH) played ten games before they came to Lynah?"

and they were 8-1, not 9-1. they then lost 7 straight.

Matt Carberry wrote:

I think that should be November 2000.

Right, it was November of the 2000-2001 season.

Avash \'05 wrote:

and they were 8-1, not 9-1. they then lost 7 straight.

Right again; their tenth game was a loss to Niagara.

USCHO generally -- agree or disagree -- has waited until all teams played 16 teams to post PWR. To be honest, I don't know what will be the consideration now that the criteria has been eliminated.

Perhaps it will just be whenever the programmers are able to re-write the program.

And - John - if you need help on searching USCHO, just let me know

That was sort of the intended gist of my "independent source" question, BRA. But remember, I'm in law school now - so I need to see evidence and refutation.

Beeeej

I'd settle for either, Beeej. A bit early in your legal career for Article 8 of the F.R.E., but what you have here isn't evidence. We can discuss the finer points at Baker Field on Saturday.

Yeah...and I also "heard" that Chris Higgins had agreed to come to Cornell, but went to Yale instead. Maybe the Daily Sun can break this Harvard non-story as well.

Don't tell me you're claiming Ben '03 made a deathbed statement. )

See you Saturday!

Beeeej

From the article posted on the fish tossing thread:

[q]As for rumors circulating around the East Hill that Harvard might be searching for a neutral site for future Cornell games, they are false, according to Nighman and Crimson head coach Mark Mazzoleni.

"It's not a Harvard rumor," Mazzoleni said, asserting that it came from Ithaca. "It's an absolutely ridiculous rumor. It wouldn't show a lot of courage on our part. It's erroneous. It's just a way to add fuel to the fire."[/q]

Do you realize that we are 4-10-3 vs. Havard(sucks) AT LYNAH since 1984-5????

Take out the National Championship caliber Harvard years through 1990ish and what is the record?

That's very odd, because I count us being 7-2-2 at Lynah since "The Reawakening" on Nov. 11, 1995. You obviously aren't counting the home playoff games in your total. 4-2-1 if you count home regular season games only.

However, you have done a fine job at uncovering a good source of hate. I remember other members of the Class of '99 coming into their final Harvard Game as undergrads with a 9-0-1 record vs. Crimson. They got a little too cocky with their "what's the big deal about beating Harvard?" attitude. They lost that last game, and will eat crow the rest of their lives, if I have anything to say about it.

Much like the Clarkson Class of '96 who had one more game to become the first class (perhaps ever) to go undefeated vs. SLU. They lost.

Anyway, the history through 1999-2000: [www.hockey.cornell.edu]

Much like the Clarkson Class of '96 who had one more game to become the first class (perhaps ever) to go undefeated vs. SLU. They lost.

And, might I say, much like the current crop of Dartmouth seniors...

BTW, if they're the first class to go undefeated against SLU, aren't they also the first class ever? (Just trying to figure out why the parentheses are there.)

Erica wrote:
[Q]BTW, if they're the first class to go undefeated against SLU, aren't they also the first class ever? (Just trying to figure out why the parentheses are there.)[/Q]

The parentheses are there because it's an uncertain aside in my own thought process. I was originally going to say something like "the first class in many years" or "X decades," but then had the "maybe it's the first ever, but I don't know" thought and left that in as a parenthetical and omitted the other stuff. I assumed that one of our Clarkson friends might chime in with an agreement or correction. So geez...lighten up on the literal deconstruction of my grammar.

For that matter, the ten-year regular-season winless streak was part of the reason that the hatred of Harvard was at such a high level when Schafer took over in 1995.

On a related note, do you think there's currently a huge hatred of Dartmouth among the Faithful in the present? I know I hate 'em, and I know a few others who do as well, but I can't speak for everyone. What do you think?

at the moment they are a very close second.

I dunno about very close for me, but definitely second.

The forum is definitely popular. Heck - it is even used for USCHO articles:

From USCHO

"If you pay any attention to ECAC hockey, you surely know that the big Harvard at Cornell matchup will take place Friday night at Lynah Rink. We've talked at nauseam about the fish, and everyone knows that Big Red fans hate Harvard.

The fact that the Cornell student newspaper ran a story on Thursday entitled "Harvard — You Still Suck" and then the following day provided a how-to guide for students planning to smuggle fish into the rink speaks clearly to that point.

Then there are the rampant and always entertaining Message Board posts about the rivalry. If you believe everything that is typed, you now know that Sam Paolini's mother won the 50-50 raffle at last February's game, you think that the Harvard coaching staff has been trying desperately to move the game to a neutral site and that the movie Love Story was a work of "Satan or his closest corporeal counterpart."


"

Melissa wrote:

If you believe everything that is typed, you now know that Sam Paolini's mother won the 50-50 raffle at last February's game...

Well, she DID.

One of the guys who got revenge on Volonnino wrote:

On a related note, do you think there's currently a huge hatred of Dartmouth among the Faithful in the present? I know I hate 'em, and I know a few others who do as well, but I can't speak for everyone. What do you think?

I hate Dartmouth. My USCHO tagline even said so.

Not more than Harvard or Penn, but more than Clarkson at this point.

Josh: Have you forgotten already about the dirty junk Clarkson pulled in that game last year?

littleredfan wrote:

Josh: Have you forgotten already about the dirty junk Clarkson pulled in that game last year?

No, but with us being 6-1 against them over the past 3 years, my hate for them is just somewhat diluted. Much of it left with Willie Mitchell, as well. I still hate them though, and if we beat Dartmouth in February, I'll be glad to move Clarkson back up. )

FYI: We started that crap last year. . .remember Palahicky clocked someone in corner which lead to the festivities that ensued.