WTF???

[Melissa\'01]

Tho I think we were all a bit upset initiallly about the brackets I am glad that we all are now calmer, simply looking forward to the games and expecting the best outcome. This quote from the Sun says a lot and I only hope that the extra confidence pays off!

Three Cornell seniors -- Bâby, Murray, and defenseman Travis Bell -- and Harvard's Moore, Brendan Bernakevich, and Grumet-Morris joined Brown's Yann Danis on the ECAC All-Tournament Team, with LeNeveu taking top honors. Although grateful to be named the most valuable player, LeNeveu was more focused on the team's success.

"It's a great feeling," he said of his award, "but the number one reason why we came here was to win this championship ...

"It's rewarding knowing that all our hard work is finally paying off, but we're still not done. We're still going on to the NCAA championship, and we're going to the Frozen Four."



Copyright © 2003 by The Cornell Daily Sun

[Melissa\'01]

is anyone else having problems getting to any link from, this page (ie. Wodon's commitee controversy article) and ESPN in general or is my browser just being a fussy overreacting brat?

[Ken 1970]

ianmccaw@admin.umass.edu
wayne.dean@yale.edu
dillont@canisius.edu
rgrahame@du.edu
rhmason@msu.edu
frank.serratore@usafa.af.mil



Post Edited (03-24-03 08:26)

[jtwcornell91]

People,

Please don't barrage the committee with incoherent rantings (or subscribe them to pornographic mailing lists).  The last thing we should want is to look like a bunch of raving [insert least favorite Hockey East school here] fans.

We got a bad draw thanks to the procedure the committee was following, which said:

* Teams ranked 13-16 in the PWR have to be 4 seeds
and
* Teams from the same conference can't play in the first round

They seeded teams by overall ranking as much as possible within that, but they didn't feel they could depart from either of those.  The stupid part of that was that the "banding", which was supposed to ensure "competitive equity", actually forced them to pair the #1 team with the #14 team and not with the much weaker #28 or #29 teams.

The way in which they screwed up was not noticing that there was a way out of the whole thing, since if they'd looked only at pairwise comparisons between tournament teams and not the total PWR (which has certainly been the case in the past), St. Cloud would have been #12 and there would only have been one WCHA team as a 4 seed.  So it would perhaps have been a lot more useful to send them an email Saturday night pointing this out.

For what it's worth, we got an easier draw than we deserved last year.  We were the last at-large bid, #10 overall, and we got to play the #23 team.  Going by seedings, the #5 or #6 team should have earned that.

[Al DeFlorio]

John T. Whelan '91 wrote:
The way in which they screwed up was not noticing that there was a way out of the whole thing, since if they'd looked only at pairwise comparisons between tournament teams and not the total PWR (which has certainly been the case in the past), St. Cloud would have been #12 and there would only have been one WCHA team as a 4 seed.

John, I want to be sure what it is you're saying has "been the case in the past," because it's somewhat ambiguous in your posting.  Have they used "total PWR" in the past, or only "comparisons between tournament teams?"

And do their published guidelines specify clearly which approach is supposed to be used, or is that left ambiguous--in which case, they've given themselves considerable room for "subjectivity?"

And, in any case, with 16 teams now in the tournament, the first-round-intraconference-matchup-avoidance rule should be canned.  As they now ignore regular season conference finish and conference tournament placement  (other than the champs) in choosing the field--much to Keith's and my displeasure--they should ignore conference affiliation in seeding it.



Post Edited (03-24-03 09:54)

[ugarte]

Al DeFlorio wrote:
And, in any case, with 16 teams now in the tournament, the first-round-intraconference-matchup-avoidance rule should be canned.  As they now ignore regular season conference finish and conference tournament placement  (other than the champs) in choosing the field--much to Keith's and my displeasure--they should ignore conference affiliation in seeding it.

I am not terribly concerned about whether conference finish and conference tournament affect either bids or seeding.  I am comfortable with a system in which conference results are used for conference tournament seeding, but all games are equally relevant for the NCAAs.

On the other hand, I agree with you that having the committee avoid  interconference matchups as a rule, rather than a preference, is a terrible mistake.  When there are only 4 decent conferences, and only two are deep enough to have this problem, avoiding interconference matchups presents an unfair bias in favor of WCHA and Hockey East.  It is exacerbated dramatically when the falloff between the last at-large bid and the MAAC/CHA champs is as large as it is this year.

It is also insane that they were committed more to "bands" than a sense of seeding fairness.  If they "broke" the bands just a little - recognizing the similarity of #12 and #13, Minnesota would have played #12 Harvard, BU would have gotten #13 Mankato and we would have played WSU.  To keep the bands, Cornell is stuck playing #13  Mankato instead of #29 Wayne State (and only #29 because the non-TUCs that would be rated higher than WSU don't count).   An interconference matchup could have been avoided giving Minnesota a team "1 rank" better than they earned, but instead using bands gave Cornell a team "16 ranks" better. (If Mankato is actually #14, not #13, adjust your math accordingly, and let BU play SCSU. There are other flaws in here that I don't feel like cleaning up, but I think you get my point.)



Post Edited (03-24-03 13:02)

[kingpin248]

Wodon speaks - and he says it was completely by the numbers and the rules the committee had.

http://www.uscho.com/news/2003/03/24_006603.php

[Ken 1970]

On the other hand, if MSU lives by a wide open offensive strategy and has a weak defense, particularly on the power play, as Mav fans on USCHO are saying, this game may have the virtue of not being so difficult after all while being somewhat entertaining.  

And for $84 we deserve every possible minute of entertainment we can get.

[Al DeFlorio]

wrote:
And for $84 we deserve every possible minute of entertainment we can get.

And all the crullers we can eat.:-(

[Scersk \'97]

OK, looking past the obvious injustices created by seeding strictures, I'm not--I repeat not--completely unhappy about how our brackets turned out.  Of course, I also look at hockey as a game about hate, so my seemingly optimistic glasses actually view the world in a silver and black-lined sheen.

Regional

I'm somewhat worried at the lack of hate potential, but I like how we match up with these teams.

MSU-Mankato:  What are they, exactly?  Are they *the* Minnesota State University, or are they lowly Mankato State?  My solution:  think of them as RPI.  RPI : Mankato State :: Rensselaer : Minnesota State University (:: CCT : Clarkson University).  Play defense against them, and they should crumble.  Is defense a strength of ours?  Yes.  Look at "MSU"s numbers away from that 200x100 ice sheet of theirs... not too impressive.

BC:  Hmmm... well, our first loss to BC was 24-1 back in the dark ages, and they've had our number of late (very late, i.e., last meeting 1994).  My solution:  think of them as Clarkson.  If any team in Hockey Least aspires to the Clarkson mantle of tournament futility (except for the recent NCAA championship, of course) it would be BC.  Expect them to choke, and treat them like a fragile china set to be dashed against the wall.  Break them early and often.  So, I'll be seeing Green and Gold if we play BC.

Ohio State:  Finally, we hit some hate.  OSU strikes me as a CCHA school trying to become the program that Cornell is--bruising defense and great goaltending, i.e., an old-style CCHA team from the 90s.  Hate sometimes comes from similarities, and our consecutive losses to them in Florida should provide enough motivation.

Semifinal

Geez, do I really have to spell out the potential fun of a semifinal against BU, Hahvahd, or UHN?  This is another reason I don't mind our matchups:  if there is any justice whatsoever in the manipulations of the Hockey Gods, they will not let us miss these potential semifinal opponents.  Imagine any of these teams in a national semifinal:  I'm shaking with bile and vitriol already.  In the tradition of spreading around the hate, I would hope for UHN--Hahvahd and BU have had enough this season, I think.

Final

Finals, to contradict completely everything I've just said, are about love.  This ECAC final was about the two best teams in the league playing the best hockey game I've ever seen--flying, careening, hitting, shooting.  Finals are a crapshoot, and should be.  Finals are about shaking hands and giving your respected opponent the game-winning puck.  If we make it, I don't care who we play in the final, but a matchup with Minnesota would be pretty sweet.  Just think of the love... er... oh, and we've only played Minnesota once ever, in the first game of the Mariucci Classic in 1993-94.  Yep, they scheduled us as the patsies of the tournament.  I hate Minnesota too, I guess.

There is one opponent I would rather see in the final, but it is not up to me to determine whether or not the Hockey Gods think me worthy of the greatest of exorcisms.  You see, I live in Ann Arbor, and sometimes love and hate are closely intertwined...

[Ken 1970]

Right, don't barrage them with drivel, but do barrage them.  They deserve it, and that's how broken things get fixed.  It probably doesn't take more than holding up the mirror to them:

1 v 13
2 v 29
3 v 28::nut::

says it all.

[Jeff Hopkins \'82]

A good friend of mine freshman year was a transfer from Purdue, so in response to your last post:

"Hail to those mother f***ers!
 Hail to those big c**ks***ers!
 Hail!  Hail! To Michigan
 The cesspool of the west!

JH

[jtwcornell91]

Sorry, it was hard to be succinct and unambiguous at the same time.  In the past, they have seeded by individual comparisons and not by the overall PWR.  Joe Marsh even explicitly pointed that out in an interview with Adam Wodon in 1997.  (It's still on USCHO, but I don't have the link at the moment.)

[jtwcornell91]

big red apple wrote:
It is also insane that they were committed more to "bands" than a sense of seeding fairness.  If they "broke" the bands just a little - recognizing the similarity of #12 and #13, Minnesota would have played #12 Harvard, BU would have gotten #13 Mankato and we would have played WSU.  To keep the bands, Cornell is stuck playing #13  Mankato instead of #29 Wayne State (and only #29 because the non-TUCs that would be rated higher than WSU don't count).   An interconference matchup could have been avoided giving Minnesota a team "1 rank" better than they earned, but instead using bands gave Cornell a team "16 ranks" better. (If Mankato is actually #14, not #13, adjust your math accordingly, and let BU play SCSU.

This is the particular nail we need to hit on the head.  The idea behind keeping teams in bands is to maintain the "competitive equity" of the brackets, i.e., make sure 1-seeds play 4-seeds and 2-seeds play 3-seeds.  Sounds great in principle, but if they're going to tie their hands as much as they do about placing host teams in regionals and keeping conference opponents apart, they need to allow for the possibility of seeding teams outside their bands, especially switching 3 and 4 seeds.  As Adam puts it, if you're willing to unbalance things by switching #14 with #16, especially when the gap between #14 and #15 is so large, you should also be willing to entertain switching #13 with #11 if that's less disruptive to the brackets.

Also, since the committee has abandoned any semblance of using the individual comparisons (or else OSU would have been a 4 seed anyway and everything would have worked nicely), they should switch to a system that actually gives them a straight 1-29 ordering.

[SCM \'85]

If they had used KRACH instead of PWR to set the seeds, the committee would have been forced to flip a seed or two to avoid interconference matchups given the host school locations!!!  Three Hockey East teams would have been #2 seeds along with Michigan.  Providence would have been a #2 seed.  If they keep this system they will be forced to flip some seeds in the future, and it's ridiculous that they didn't do it this year given the result of not doing so.