Ivy Title

[Brunke]

So with Cornell's win last night and Dartmouth's loss we now have a 2 point lead for the ivy title (right?, according to ivyleaguesports.com) so if we win tonight does that give us the outright title even without having played the Big Green up in their house?

[jtwcornell91]

No, Dartmouth is 4-2-1, so if they win out they will be 7-2-1 and if we beat Yale and lose to Dartmouth we will be 6-3-1.  (For that matter, Harvard is currently 5-3-1.)

[Craine]

A win tonight does not seal it for us... IF we win tonight, we'd have 13 points with one game (Dartmouth) to go... Dartmouth has 9 points, but they get to play us, along with Princeton and Yale... So, they could end up with 15 points...

Right now, the standing are (based on Points Per Game):

Cornell - 1.375 (11 Points in 8 Games)
Dartmouth - 1.2857 (9 Points in 7 Games)
Harvard - 1.125 (8 Points in 9 Games)
Yale - 0.833 (5 Points in 6 Games)
Brown - 0.75 (6 Points in 8 Games)
Princeton - 0.5714 (4 Points in 7 Games)

A win tonight would allow us to control our own destiny when we go to Hanover next Friday...

[Graham \'02]

So a win for us tonight makes next weekends Dartmouth game the de facto Ivy League championship game, right?

[kaelistus]

If we beat Dartmouth next week we are guaranteed at least a share of the title irregardless of what happens tonight.  If we don't beat Dartmouth then the odds aren't so great.

[Greg Berge]

Standings and results:

http://www.spiritone.com/~kepler/2002/2002_ivy_results.html

[mjh40]

Greg, Correction on Yale...2-4-1.

[Greg Berge]

Done.  Thx.

[kingpin248]

Cornell wins the Ivy title outright if it beats Dartmouth next Friday night.  The Red would then have 15 league points, and no other team would be able to get as high as 13.

[KeithK]

The following are a set of Magic Numbers for Ivies, ala John Whelan's ECAC Nutshell page at slack.net.  Of course, since there are no Ivy tiebreakers things are a little easier:

                         Cor   Dar   Har   Brn   Yal   Pri
Cornell        13- 5-2     -    3     1     0     0     0
Dartmouth       9- 5-6     7    -     5     2     3     2
Harvard         9- 7-4     7    7     -     2     3     2
Brown           6-10-4    xx   10     8     -     6     5
Yale            5- 9-6    xx   11     9     6     -     6
Princeton       4-10-6    xx   12    10     7     8     -

Remember that getting a MN down to one is enough to win a share of the title
so even a tie Friday clinches a share of the title.

And if that doesn' sufficiently demonstrate my hockey geekdom... Cornell gets a share of the Ivy title in 1944 of 2187 possible outcomes, or 88.9%.

[Robb]

Keith,

Does your script just do an exhaustive search of the possibilities?  I've been working on some tools of my own, but it gets harder when you look at the ECAC as a whole.  E.g. with only two weekends left, there are 3^24 = 282,429,536,481 cases to check.  If you could check 100 cases per second, that's about 89.49 years to run all the combinations (yes, accounting for leap years :-P ).  Anyway, just curious if you had figured out something more clever, or if your algorithm only works for small numbers of games (12 games remaining would only take 88 minutes).  So you can't do an exhaustive search until the very last weekend of the season - pretty pointless by then.

Geeky minds want to know!

[DeltaOne81 \'03]

Glad to find some other stat freaks on here B-]

Anyhow, after tonight's last second (well, last 15.6 seconds) win this is how the Ivy league title plays out...

If we win at Dartmouth, we win the Ivy title outright - we're up by 6 on them and Harvard (both would then have two games left)

If we tie at Dartmouth, we're up by 4 on them (they having two games to play), so we at worst tie for the title if Dartmouth beats Yale and Princeton. We'd be up with 5 on Harvard and they'd have 2 games left, so it would at worst be a two way tie for the Ivy title.

If we loose at Dartmouth, well, this gets sticky... we're only up by two on them, 4 on Harvard - each of them having two games left. Harvard can at best tie us, Dartmouth can pass us w/ 3 or more pts vs. Yale/Princeton, tie us w/ 2 or we can still win the Ivies if they only get one. Either way, Ivy title wise, it's big that we at least don't loose next Friday.

Oh, did I mention that Harvard's remaining two Ivy games are also Yale/Princeton... those guys get around :-P . And as a final, obvious, note: Yale, Princeton, and Brown have no chance at the title.

Either way, Let's Go Red! :-D

[KeithK]

Well, it's a lot easier looking at Ivy standings because the pesky tiebreaker problems go away since the Ivies don't bother breaking ties. Adn when there are only 7 games and 3^7 = 2187 possibilities left it's real easy to slap together a simple spreadsheet and Perl script to compute possibilities.

My attempts at the ECAC tiebreakers haven't worked yet - I can never seem to wrap my mind around coding all of the possibilities, let alone handling the number of cases.  And flooding slack.net with 3^24 possibilities via Perl script would probablynot be appreciated  :-) .

[Robb]

Yeah - I'm not even sure if the ECAC tiebreakers are fully defined.  I seem to remember that there can be cases that are ambiguous and/or definitely unresolvable with the official tie-breaking procedure.  Thank goodness we've never seen one arise.  Which is a worse system: the electoral college or the ECAC tiebreakers?  You make the call!

[DeltaOne81 \'03]

I emailed the ECAC about this about a year ago actually. Here was the response:

Thank you for your inquiry and interest in the ECAC.

The tie-breaking procedures for Division I men's ice hockey are:

In the event that there are ties in the final regular-season standings, the
following tie-breaking procedures will be used to seed teams for the
championship:

1.   Comparison of game results between tied teams (head to head)
2.   Comparison of results of games against the top five teams
3.   Comparison of results of games against the top 10 teams
4.   Goal differential in head-to-head competition
5.   Goal differential in games against the top five teams
6.   Goal differential in games against the top 10 teams

If you have any questions, please let me know.

Stephen R. Hagwell
Assistant Commissioner
Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC)

Though what I'm not exactly clear on is how this applied to multiple-way ties? How do you do head-to-head in that situation, etc?