Ned Harkness Cup and Cleary Bedpan?

[Beeeej]

Hallelujah.  Although standing around and scratching themselves while their opponents score at will wouldn't be a very good way for a team to prepare themselves for the post-season tournament, I've never understood why it should nevertheless be good enough to qualify them for it.

Beeeej

[billhoward]

There is no one perfect team to represent a league at the tournament.

The RS points leader ("regular season champion") won more games but that's over the course of the season. It might not be the best team to represent because it slipped due to injuries (Cornell w/o Vesce last year) or another team jelled the last two months.

There is no title or award for the team whose winning percentage sloped upward later in the season. Maybe this team wins the playoffs, maybe not.

The first-round (eg ECAC) tournament champion got hot for 3-4-5 games and maybe that provides momentum going into the NCAAs but maybe it was also lucky. If Cornell played Clarkson again in the best of three opening, what are the odds Clarkson's luck would hold out again?

You could have every round be best 2-games-of-3 to avoid the odd off game, but that wouldn't avoid the odd off two games. (Think Red Sox here.) Funny in the ECAC that it's the first round, where theoretically the teams are most apart in talent and one game should be enough, that it's a best of 3 series.

You add more teams to the tournament, you increase the odds a nobody knocks out a somebody. Sixty-four teams play for the basketball title, meaning you have to win six in a row, not five or six as in much earlier days. That increases the odds a favored Duke or NC or UCLA doesn't make it. How often is the best (by some definition) team superior enough to win six in a row against good competitiion by dint of talent not odds?

You play multiple games each round, the players miss almost a month of school.

So long as we all agree the tournament crowns a tournament champion, not the best team, all's well and good, and it gives eLynah and eMinnesotaGophers etcetera something to grouse about for the six months of the off-season.

[jtwcornell91]

[Q]KeithK Wrote:
What you don't know with strong confidence, regardless of what KRACH might say is who the best team in the country is because of disparate schedules.[/q]

KRACH itself makes no claims of confidence.  It does the best it can using all the available won-loss data.  I believe Ken actually did experiment at one point with assigning confidences to the orderings of teams, and they were pretty low.  Of course, the same is also true at the end of a twelve team home-and-home round robin.   (Or even a 162-game relatively balanced schedule; note how the Red Sox were considered the favorites entering the LCS.)

I like a little middle ground.  Have playoffs to determine the champion, but only let the best teams, based on the results throughout the season, participate.  I've softened a little on the issue of letting more than half the league into the postseason in the case of college sports, but 8 or 10 out of 12 would be preferable to 12 out of 12.

But if you're going to have a postseason tournament seeded based on the RS, you should call the winner of that the champion.  If the RS winner is the champion, why bother having playoffs?

[KeithK]

I wasn't really trying to rip on KRACH or make a statement about confidence intervals. Just wanted to pre-empt someone from saying that the rankings tell us for sure who is better.

I agree that if you bother having a playoff, the playoff winner has to be the league champion.