2005-06 Schedule

[KeithK]

Besides, Niagara has won more NCAA games this century than a bunch of WCHA, CCHA and HE teams.  Not to mention every ECAC team besides Cornell and SLU, I think.

[Josh '99]

[Q]Jim Hyla Wrote:
Not that I think that he cares about what we think, but I sort of think he seems to know what he is doing. Until he shows otherwise, I'd cut him alot of slack. Those of you who are new to CU hockey the last 10 years need to understand that this is proably the second best time in CU hockey history and although it hasn't reached the height that Coach Harkness did (and I doubt that anyone ever will), it is still the best that we could ever expect.

Sit back and enjoy this time and this coach; for if he stays with us we are fortunate and if he leaves we will be the loser.[/q]Well said.  :-)

[oceanst41]

and since Quinnipiac is joining the ECAC won't their schedule look remarkably better in the PWR therefore making them no worse than UVM was for us last year...it's not like the PWR will treat QU as an AHA team again next year.

[CrazyLarry]

Amen to that.  Some of us remember listening to road play-in games on the radio and watching dump-and-chase all season long.  And by chase, I mean road-runner/coyote chase, as in, not get.

I suppose I didn't watch too many years of futility, but it should be noted, my Cornell hockey fandom began with at least 5 months before I actually saw a win.

Still, I must say, it'd be nice to play a regular season game against a WCHA team more than once a decade.  And RIT doesn't exactly excite me, either.

Of course, hosting the Spartans is good.   Very good.

Now, when do we schedule a trip to Alaska... I'm still waiting for that one.

Larry

[dadeo]

ok - but a team isnt going to go undefeated in a season.
(well, we did 30something years ago).  So, the only way we're gonna get a #1 seed is to go practically undefeated.

Yes, beating MSU and BC woulda helped.  But look at Minnesota, they lost a sh!tload of games,a dn are a #1 seed because of theyre SOS.  Period.

[jeh25]

[Q]dadeo Wrote:

Yes, beating MSU and BC woulda helped.  But look at Minnesota, they lost a sh!tload of games,a dn are a #1 seed because of theyre SOS.  Period.[/q]

Umm. No. Your statement is just flat out wrong. It isn't some SOS artifact. Minnesota IS the #4 team in the country.

http://www.uscho.com/rankings/?data=krach

(Yes, I know that the committee doesn't use KRACH, but it nicely illustrates that MN *is* correctly placed as the 4th number one seed. )

[Robb]

[Q]CrazyLarry Wrote:

 Amen to that.  Some of us remember listening to road play-in games on the radio and watching dump-and-chase all season long.  And by chase, I mean road-runner/coyote chase, as in, not get.

I suppose I didn't watch too many years of futility, but it should be noted, my Cornell hockey fandom began with at least 5 months before I actually saw a win.

Still, I must say, it'd be nice to play a regular season game against a WCHA team more than once a decade.  And RIT doesn't exactly excite me, either.

Of course, hosting the Spartans is good.   Very good.

Now, when do we schedule a trip to Alaska... I'm still waiting for that one.

Larry[/q]
IIRC, the Ivy League does not honor the exemption for games played in Alaska, so don't hold your breath waiting for any of us to go out there.  Why bother to endure the travel if you don't get more games out of the deal?

[DeltaOne81]

Unless you argue that due to imperfect data, KRACH also overweights SOS. A perfectly makeable argument that has been made many times.

[Big Red Colonel]

ECAC teams played very well this year.  Perhaps we can all hope that the overall quality of our own league improves, then it really won't matter what else is going on.

Is this likely?  I don't know, someone that has followed the ECAC since the HE split should tell us whether they think the overall quality of the league has rebounded.  I am hopeful, based on the continued excellence of the Harvard program and the recent strength of the Colgate and Dartmouth programs, coupled with the historical quality and tradition of RPI, StL and Clarkson that it could be a top notch league again.  I just can't see how come these schools aren't excellent year in and year out.  Are they losing recruits to us?  Are more kids playing juniors?  Are they losing kids to the CCHA and WCHA, and if so, what is the major reason why?  Facilities, fan base, academics ... probably a bit of everything.

I understand Jim's point from up above (about this being a great time for CU hockey) and I agree whole heartedly, but I am sure I am not alone when I say that we all really want this to continue.  It has been an awesome ride and it is absolutely thrilling watching our teams mature and play well.  We don't expect NCAA titles every year, like a Denver or Minny, but why can't we hope to have a shot at it every year - Maine does, BC does, UNH does, OSU does, - you know, if things break our way it can happen for us just like it can happen for any one of them ... you catch my drift.  

LGR!  Can't wait for the weekend.  And even if we cannot pull it out, it will be fun watching anyway (my wife probably will disagree with this statement as she sees how nervous I get watching the games).

-Mike

[KeithK]

[q]We don't expect NCAA titles every year, like a Denver or Minny[/q]For the record, before last season Denver hadn't won the national title since 1969 and spent a lot of that time as a middle of the pack WCHA team.  For that matter, even Minnesota hadn't won in 20 years before their back to back titles in '02 and '03.

[jeh25]

[Q]DeltaOne81 Wrote:

 Unless you argue that due to imperfect data, KRACH also overweights SOS. A perfectly makeable argument that has been made many times.[/q]

I just don't buy it. KRACH uses itself to generate the SOS. It's an recursive algorithm that reaches it's final result via iteration. Even if you could feed in an overestimated SOS at the beginning, the SOS would be corrected as the process iterated to completion.

I'll let JTW defend the actual math - I'm merely an *applied* statistics guy - but I'd suggest this "prefectly makeable argument" is made by hockey fans that don't have any friggin' clue what they are talking about.

Let me put it another way, why can you pick up an Advanced stats textbook or a copy of Matlab or SAS today and find info on the Bradley-Terry method? The model is 53 years old and it's still being used today. If it were so fatally flawed as the hockey naysayers would like us to believe, then why didn't the professional mathemeticians and statisticians abandoned it years ago.

http://ftp.sas.com/techsup/download/stat/bradley.html

http://www.stat.psu.edu/~dhunter/code/btmatlab/

[ithacat]

[Q]RatushnyFan Wrote:

 While MSU and the holiday tourney are nice, I wish we could get some OOC games better than RIT and Niagara on the schedule.  Blah!!  Those games do nothing to get us ready for the NCAA's, putting aside whether it's good/bad from a PWR perspective.  [/q]

It's unfortunate that the Ivies are penalized 5 games, at least I think it's unfortunate. Putting Cornell 2 weeks behind the rest of the hockey-playing country would almost seem to require they schedule teams from the CHA & AH to begin their season. Playing Michigan State right out of the gate when they will have had 4 or more games almost seems to negate home ice advantage. Such is life.

On another note, I think scheduling RIT is great for central/western NY hockey fans. Playing a home-and-home annually would be a blast. One game in Lynah and one game in Blue Cross Arena would be beautiful. They might be able to sell out BCA & it wouldn't hurt Cornell to build a strong recruiting base in Rochester. Boston College has 2 players from Rochester on their roster and are getting a goalie next year from the Flower City, as is Michigan. There's also a kid from Rochester on the national team that played in the junior worlds this year. Of course there was Sam Paolini, and NHLers Brian Gionta and Jason Bonsignore as well. Not too bad for the last 10 years from a small city.

RIT could be competitive next year. They struggled this year with a pretty young team and still beat the US under-18 team 7-4 (H****** beat the USNDT by the same score, Michigan State lost to them, and Michigan beat them 6-5). 9 of their top 12 scorers return next year. Both goalies return (including IHS alum, David Wrisley),  and they redshirted a goalie who was second team BCHL. I'm not saying they'll make an NCAA run, but they probably won't embarass themselves next year. Of course, I married into an RIT family & for the sake of domestic tranquility...::nut:: ...I must keep the peace.

[DeltaOne81]

jeh,

I don't disagree that Bradley-Terry is a sound method, although I have to take that on faith. While I understand that concepts I don't have a great enough grasp to fully, deeply understand everything. But my point is that the calculations are only as good as the data their based on. With the low number of interconference games, relatively (something like a 4:1 ratio), I would think that its just not really sufficient to do a completely good comparison.

As for the line "I just don't buy it. KRACH uses itself to generate the SOS. It's an recursive algorithm that reaches it's final result via iteration. Even if you could feed in an overestimated SOS at the beginning, the SOS would be corrected as the process iterated to completion."

Its fair, but it kinda also seems like a cop out. I'm not anywhere close to expert enough to delve too deeply into it, but just because something defines something itself, doesn't mean it can't be wrong, or exagerrated. Just because I pick something myself and then use it... well, the logic seems circular. KRACH can't be wrong because the S.O.S. can't be wrong because its determined by KRACH which is determined by the S.O.S. which can't be wrong because...

I don't think KRACH, or really many other rankings for that matter, fairly take into account how difficult it can be to put up a good schedule against poor teams. A team that goes 33-1 (or 32-2 or some such)

Sure, going 17-17 against the top 5 reasonably proves that you're probably in the top 5 (or, um, 6 including yourself, I guess). But going 33-1 (again, or 32-2, whatever) against the lower half of the league may very well be something that only a #1 in the country could do, but KRACH has no proof to put you up there, so you could very well end up lesser. Without a signficant mixing of Common Opponents (or at lesat common opponent's opponent's), you really can't compare with too much certainly, and the collegiate environment may be insufficient to provide decent certainty.

[dadeo]

technically, MN and CU are tied for 4th, and MN wins the tie-breaker.
We lost in TUC and COp, because we only played one team that MN played (MSU), and they played alot more TUCs, so one loss to a TUC doesnt effect them as much.  (and they only won the TUC line by .6875 to .6563).
If we played better opponents, our RPI would be higher, and one loss to a TUC wouldnt kill us as much as it did against BC.

(Plus if Alaska-Anchorage managed to keep their RPI above .500, then the TUC woulda turned our way)

[KeithK]

I agree that some folks try to argue that KRACH is wrong without having any frickin' clue what they're talking about.  However, there are others who aren't convinced that it does everything "perfectly" (probably based on intuition) who do have a good idea of what it does and try to make reasonable arguments about it.  There was a long thread on USCHO recently on which several hypotheticals were discussed in an effort to understand whether KRACH over-weights SoS.  I don't think we proved anything ether way but it was an intelligent discussion. OTOH you come off like you believe Bradley Terry is the word of god.

No one here is claiming that KRACH is "fatally flawed".  It's not.  It just may not be perfect.  The fact that KRACH numbers can reproduce a team's Win% is very elegant and argues in it's favor.  But it isn't proof that it is perfect.

We don't have objective proof that Minnesota is categorically the 4th best team in the country.  We have a statistically based ranking system that puts Minnesota there.  The reason they are ranked #4 by KRACH has a lot to do with their schedule strength (though I wouldn't characterize it as an artifact). For that matter, their #1 seed in the tournament has a lot to do with SoS, because the committee uses SoS in an explicit fashion via RPI (unlike KRACH).  So to say that "Minnesota is a #1 seed based on SoS" is a flat out wrong statement is incorrect.  Maybe they deserve it - that's a worthy argument.  But it is a fact that SoS is a factor in their seeding.