Frozen Four Results

[Trotsky]

In the context of this discussion only, I might almost say Very Serious Posters, but I suppose that's not really fair.

Krugman is a Yale alum.  

I hope eLF never becomes a place where new posters feel they can't make a point unless they have 2000 posts.

BUT.  At the same time, a poster can't just make the same emotionally-charged statement 20 times in a row and then claim it's a circle jerk because people aren't converted to the One True Faith.  The appropriate response to not convincing somebody of your argument is to (1) refine your argument or (2) ascribe it to a matter of taste and move on.

We get that there are people who will never root for ECAC teams in the NCAAs.  We understand their arguments.  We simply do not agree with them.  After a while, the repetition of the same sentiment over and over and over again becomes browbeating -- a strategy that doesn't often work anywhere and particularly not on a forum where the vast majority of posters are intelligent, highly educated, and self-confident in their powers of perception and reason.

At the end of the day we are Cornell hockey fans.  We can enjoy that and try to respect our occasional differences, or we can subdivide into, say, which NHL team we root for, and then rip each other to shreds like George and Martha after a bottle of scotch.

[Trotsky]

3. We had our chances in 2002 in the NCAA semis and Leneveau let in a soft goal and we took a late penalty but why obsess on that? (As I just did.)

If you're going to obsess get the goddamn year right.  

[Trotsky]

Were you guys watching the Yale power play yesterday? Unbelievable the way they move that puck around. Cornell's PP is a fucking joke by comparison, or it would be if it weren't the culmination of a decade of facepalm on that front. At times it I felt like I was watching the 2003 semifinal, with UML as Cornell—a bunch of trees playing a defensive game against a much faster team—except in this version, they were getting creamed on the stat sheet despite keeping the game close on the scoreboard.

The fact that it was Yale does shake one of the foundational assumptions of post-80s Cornell hockey: that for an Ivy to compete nationally they have to have a defense-first system because blue chip offensive players will always go to CHL or the Factory Schools.  Yale is a direct and dramatic refutation of that axiom.

I love Schafer for saving the program in the mid-90s and I'll never be able to shake that loyalty, but if I were anti-Schafer or just young and craving a run and gun style, that's where I'd start to make my argument for change.

The other thing that has been noticeable throughout the NCAAs is that Union, Yale and Q all played like they were having a blast out there.  It wasn't "creativity" -- Union for instance isn't creative at all, they're just a solid team.  But they had the "Leadership and Passion" of our '02-'08 teams.  Meanwhile, in recent seasons, even when Cornell was winning, they played like they were skating in psychological cement.  It looked like a job, and a not very rewarding one.

[kaelistus]

It is unfortunate you derive such pleasure from something that will ultimately hurt Cornell, blah blah blah blah blah blah

Stop talking in extremes.  Cornell doesn't suck.  Nothing short of winning a championship is going to undo this damage, and that task just got considerably harder.

Strongly disagree with your basic premise. Go Yale!

[ugarte]

The biggest hurdle Cornell hockey faces in the ECAC is the same one that Cornell basketball will face in the long term in basketball: HYP are now basically scholarship programs with very high academic standards. The only players who can't get scholarships don't really need them anyway. The more academic-minded exceptions will take scholarships from comparable non-Ivies. Full stop. The difference between Yale and Harvard is the distance between what Ted Donato's potential and Ted Donato's results. The difference between H/Y and Princeton appears to be caring enough to want to win. Yale has had our number - but our overall results in the last 5 years have been on par with Yale's, the last three weeks aside.

Cornell had a bad year (with flashes of very good) one year removed from being a goal away from the Final Four. Somehow that has translated into Cornell developing a reputation as a "9th place team". This year Kentucky lost in the first round of the NIT; next year they are bringing in 6 players currently ranked in the top 20.

Cornell had so many chances in the 2000s. That they didn't win is a huge disappointment, but how close did we come? We lost to UNH in the 2002 semis on a bad no-goal call on Hynes and a miracle save in the final minute on Baby. We lost OT games on the road against Minnesota and Wisconsin. We lost a one goal game to FSU LAST YEAR. THIS HAS BEEN AN ELITE PROGRAM. One weak year - that included coming 64 seconds shy of knocking an NCAA finalist out in the conference QF - is not the death of the program.

In a nutshell, I want the other ECAC schools to be better than garbage. We will lose more but it will be nice when every loss doesn't drop you 8 places in the PWR because your SOS is flaming garbage to begin with. It will be more fun to win a competitive league. The competition in the Big 10 makes it more likely that Minnesota, Michigan, MSU, Wisconsin, tOSU and eventually Penn State will win national titles, not less, and that's where I want to see the ECAC.

[Scersk '97]

While it will match packages from HYP, it can't do anything for a kid who needs the financial help and can't get into HYP. It's not a great position to be in for Cornell's recruiting approach to have to be "we want you to come here. Now go apply to HYP and when you get in, we'll get you a free ride here."

HYP have an enormous financial aid advantage right now over  Cornell, Brown, and Dartmouth.  Cornell has history, tradition, etc., which is great.  But eventually money talks.

Whereas, being a historian of a somewhat Marxist bent, I completely agree with the last part of your argument and worry along with you about what HYP's money advantages mean over the long term (say, 20 to 30 years) for the competitiveness of Cornell and, even, the coherence of the Ivy League, I do have a quibble with the other 'graph.

Cornell has seemed to attract, from what I've heard and seen, great hockey players who are interested in pursuing a major within the purview of one of the statutory colleges and those whose families are either quite poor or quite rich.  Due to a number of connected factors that I will choose not to go into here, players interested in the statutory colleges are unlikely to look elsewhere in the League, ECAC or Ivy.  Those are our recruits to lose; yet, if we lose them, we do so to Michigan State, Ohio State, and the like rather than to the other League schools.  That has always been the case, but I would hazard a guess that a better profile for the league might help us grab a few more of those recruits.  (Indeed, we should do much better with in-state recruits than we have historically—as a proud product of upstate New York, it's something that has always bothered me.)  The others, whose families are either quite poor and the quite rich, might very well look at the other Ivys; indeed, I'm sure the academically gifted ones always have, but we'll always get our share of them and we'll pick up the ones who are not academically gifted enough to attend Harvard, Yale, or Princeton.  With Yale's recent success, we might lose out on some truly academically gifted recruits whose families are either rich or poor, but how many of those are there anyway?  Have we really lost many?  Will we?

So, what you're probably rolling over in your head is what this means for recruiting players whose families fit into the lower middle class or upper lower class, who, previous to these financial efforts from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, were just royally screwed.  If academically talented, they're now in the same boat as the quite poor and the quite rich; if not, they're still royally screwed.  It's too bad that we can't make the same commitments that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton can, but the financial resources are not there.  So, we'll continue to lose the less academically gifted recruits to scholarship schools as we always have; indeed, if they don't pick up a scholarship somewhere, they're heading to major junior.  But the academically gifted students whose families fall into the right economic category are now open to recruitment, in a financial sense, from all the Ivys.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but the agreement means that Cornell can offer the same exact package, should it choose, that Harvard, Yale, or Princeton offers; i.e., neither Cornell nor any of those three can "sweeten the pot."  These players were simply off the table before.

How does this mean anything else than an enormous enlargement of the recruiting pool, strengthening recruiting at any of the Ivies against any other schools?  If I were coaching at RPI, Notre Dame, BC, Michigan, Colgate, BC, BU, Northeastern, Wisconsin, CC, Michigan Tech, or Penn State, this would give me pause; in particular, if I were coaching at Union or RIT, I'd be quite worried.  Because, if I'm an academically gifted student, why wouldn't I try the Ivy League?  Cornell's going to win its share of those recruiting battles; indeed, it might create the situation where there's quite a bit more talent to go around.

So, it's not "we want you to come here—now go apply to HYP"; it's "you're applying to HYP anyway, now let us explain to you why you fit best here."  Before, it was "we'd love to have you, but we can't offer anything close to the scholarship that Michigan is offering."  To put a finer point on it, for any middle-class potential student who is academically gifted and fits within the boundaries of the new financial intiatives, money doesn't "talk."

[billhoward]

The F4 makes its annual appearance in Deadspin, although this one isn't as witless as usual.

Where does hockey fit into all of this? In the mid-1990s, [Q president John] Lahey realized that Quinnipiac was missing out on the free publicity customarily lavished on successful Division I sports programs.

Free after the $53 million for the sports complex, coaching salaries, travel, equipment. The article likens the publicity to like what Florida Gulf Coast University got out of NCAA basketball. Nice that Mahler calls this the prestigious ECAC Q got admitted to.

[jtwcornell91]

I'm definitely in the camp that wants to see the ECAC do well in the NCAAs, although it does feel a little weird that it's Quinnipiac, Union and Yale (two of which were not even in the ECAC when I was in school, and not even Division I the last time the ECAC won a title) that made the run.  I think if you replaced Union with Cornell, Yale with RPI and Q with Clarkson, it would be a little easier to rejoiced in this year's tournament run.  (This is why I'm pulling for Yale on Saturday; even if they haven't done much in the NCAAs over the years, they're still a somewhat traditional ECAC program.)

While we're all disappointed it won't be Cornell breaking the ECAC national title drought, at least we won't have to hear about how Harvard was the last ECAC team to win a national title.

[RichH]

I expect those of you who are happy about this to do this chant on Saturday (except, obviously, with the appropriate letters): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6NIDlddJHY

I suggested to Judy that we start the E-C-A-C chant while we were on the escalators exiting the arena. The walk to the bar last night, I reflected on how much league-pride I was feeling, and how utterly weird it is to feel that.  If this is how WCHA & HEA fans feel all the time, it is pretty intoxicating.

I'm beaming the rest of my time in Pittsburgh.

[billhoward]

And since it was 2003 not 2002, I lost the chance to say that "ironically, it was 10 years ago exactly that Cornell fell to ..." Speaking of overused words, count how many times Barry Melrose says "by far" as in "Hartzell is bar far playing his best hockey of the year" ... "by far that was the best hit" ... "by far he's the dominant defensive pairing in this tournament."

[KeithK]

league when my team was eliminated (for example, the NL in MLB).  In recent decades, I've kind of lost that attitude.  In baseball, I now say at the time of the World Series, I wish it would rain until spring training (ignoring the existence of stadiums with domes).  Here, I could say I wish ice would not stay frozen.  I used to be for the team that eliminated my team; I still have that preference to some extent.  I used to hate the Yankees.  In more recent times, as that waned, I'm just as happy if they win rather than some team I feel more competitive with--one more win just gets lost in the mix.  In the same way, it would not bother me if Michigan, say, won another, whereas Yale winning is too close to home.  Quinnipiac bothers me less because one can at least say they have lower academic standards and scholarships.

When I was a kid I think that was the dominant attidtude. You always (usually) pulled for your league in the playoffs or World Series. For instance, As a Yankees fan I saw no issues rooting for the Red Sox in '86. They were the AL East team (and I had a lot of annoying friends who were big Mets fans). Hand in hand with that was league loyalty in things like tha All Star game. I really wanted to beat those damn NLers because I was an AL fan.

Somewhere along the line this attitude changed. I think one big factor is the way media cvers sports. ESPN plays up rivalries to such a ridiculous degree. When the focus is on hating rivals it's hard to feel that sense of loyalty.  There are plenty of other factors one could come up with but this is a big one that comes to mind.

In college hockey I've had twenty years of EZAC threads to build up and sustain my sense of league loyalty.

[RichH]

I now officially don't give a shit who wins on Saturday. Let the partying begin two days early!

This.

Everybody in CT and PA has my permission to go on a three-day drinking binge.

When the clock strikes midnight Saturday, it's back to fuck both Yale and Q.  Until then, New Haven über alles.

This. As a CT resident in Pittsburgh, I'm obeying Trotsky's orders, and just cracked another beer.  It is party time for me.  I may even run into one of my neighbors:

https://twitter.com/CTConfidential/status/322736469158539264

[billhoward]

The other thing that has been noticeable throughout the NCAAs is that Union, Yale and Q all played like they were having a blast out there

Yale. 2010. Sean Backman. Swimming pool mishap. NCAAs: BC 9, Yale 7. http://www.collegehockeynews.com/news/2010/03/11_backman.php

[dag14]

Wow.  This is embarrassing.  I won't be back to this thread.  Ever.  If this type of posting spreads, I won't be back to eLynah, a forum I have always admired for the wit and wisdom of the posters, even when I disagreed with them.

[Jim Hyla]

Wow.  This is embarrassing.  I won't be back to this thread.  Ever.  If this type of posting spreads, I won't be back to eLynah, a forum I have always admired for the wit and wisdom of the posters, even when I disagreed with them.

Thank you. Although I won't go as far as you, the drift of this thread has been atrocious. I don't know which is worse, those that proclaim without any data (...that far majority..., ...most of us...) or those that respond by classic putdowns. Neither of these add anything to good discussion, but if it was a flame war you wanted, you got it. Going back to another poster's parental response, "You guys should be ashamed of yourselves".