Ned Harkness Cup and Cleary Bedpan?

[James]

What are the Ned Harkness Cup and the Cleary Bedpan?  Could someone explain the history behind these two things?

Thanks a lot

[pfibiger]

Ned Harkness Cup is the trophy awarded to the winner of the Everblades tournament. The Cleary Bedpan is the Cleary Cup, given to the regular-season ECAC(HL) champs.

[French Rage]

Calling it the Bedpan is basically indicative of the fact that it means squat now, ever since the NCAA took away autobids for RS champions.

[Lowell '99]

And indicative of the fact that it's named after Bill Cleary, former coach and AD of Harvard (sucks!).

[jtwcornell91]

It's also consistent  with what we've been telling Clarkson fans since at least the mid-1990s, that the ECAC champion is the winner of the tournament, not the regular season.

[Robb]

And that has nothing to do with the fact that at the time (late 90's) we'd won the tournament 9 times and only finished in first place 5 times (and not since 1974) while Clarkson had almost the exact opposite - 3 championships and 9 first-place finishes...
::whistle::

Where you stand on this issue definitely depends on where you sit!

[jtwcornell91]

[Q]Robb Wrote:

 And that has nothing to do with the fact that at the time (late 90's) we'd won the tournament 9 times and only finished in first place 5 times (and not since 1974) while Clarkson had almost the exact opposite - 3 championships and 9 first-place finishes...


Where you stand on this issue definitely depends on where you sit!
[/q]
The point is that we didn't change our tune in 2002 when we won the RS without winning the tournament.

[Al DeFlorio]

[Q]jtwcornell91 Wrote:

 [Q2]Robb Wrote:

 And that has nothing to do with the fact that at the time (late 90's) we'd won the tournament 9 times and only finished in first place 5 times (and not since 1974) while Clarkson had almost the exact opposite - 3 championships and 9 first-place finishes...


Where you stand on this issue definitely depends on where you sit!
[/Q]
The point is that we didn't change our tune in 2002 when we won the RS without winning the tournament.[/q]
More importantly, for the first thirty years or so years of ECAC Division I hockey, finishing first in the ECAC regular season got you exactly nothing other than the highest seed for the ECAC tournament...until sometime in the 90s when the NCAA misguidedly decided to give an automatic tournament bid for such.  Until then, no one even bothered to proclaim themselves "regular season champion."  No one cared.  It just didn't matter.  The champion was decided by the post-season tournament.

Now, after this brief interval of aberrant behavior, normalcy [sic] has returned and winning the Cleary pisspot once again gets you exactly nothing other than highest seed for the ECAC tournament.  Bottom line:  For all but a handful of years of ECAC hockey's 43 year existence, finishing first in the regular season has been a non-event.  Seriously.  If you weren't following ECAC hockey prior to the 90s, you simply can't understand how utterly irrelevant finishing first in the regular season was in terms of measuring a season's success.

[Robb]

I know, I know.  Jeez.

I still maintain that if you asked a Cornell senior in '99 and a Clarkson senior in '99 (both of whom had only followed college hockey for 4 years) which was more important, I bet that you'd have gotten different answers.  Even if the CC rule had never been instituted, I bet a lot of CCT fans would still tout their first place finishes, and I predict that they'll continue to do so even now that the rule has been replealed.  It has little/nothing to do with recent results, auto-bids, or longevity of hockey fandom.  It's picking a measure that puts your program (in its entire history) in the best light.  

To suggest that postseason championships is an objectively better standard for judging a program's history is a bit disingenuous.  CCT's 9 first place finishes are very impressive, and I, for one, am envious of them.  Would I trade away Whitelaw's for Bedpans?  Not even if you offered 2-for-1, and I do think it's funny to refer to it as the bedpan, but only because I know a) who it was named for AND b) which team has the most.  If the RS trophy were named the Harkness Cup (as it very arguably should be), we wouldn't call it the bedpan even if we'd *never* won it and had 20 championships.  Similarly, we also wouldn't call it the bedpan if we'd won 10 of those along with our 10 championships.

[jtwcornell91]

[Q]Robb Wrote:
I do think it's funny to refer to it as the bedpan, but only because I know a) who it was named for AND b) which team has the most[/q]

I still think it's hilarious that the team that won the first two is the team that ended its namesake's head coaching career.
 ::laugh::

[atb9]

If you asked a Cornell Engineering senior and a Clarkson Engineering senior that question, I hope that the Cornell senior would prove her intelligence over the Clarkson student.

One would hope that the team that had performed the best over the course of a season would still be the best team come playoff time, ECAC's and NCAA's.  Is it time to chant "it just doesn't matter" every time we lose during the regular season?  Of course not!  But it is conceivable that a team could come in last place of the ECAC(HL) regular season and be crowned national champion and that makes the Cleary clearly meaningless.

[Al DeFlorio]

[Q]Robb Wrote:

 I know, I know.  Jeez.

I still maintain that if you asked a Cornell senior in '99 and a Clarkson senior in '99 (both of whom had only followed college hockey for 4 years) which was more important, I bet that you'd have gotten different answers.  Even if the CC rule had never been instituted, I bet a lot of CCT fans would still tout their first place finishes, and I predict that they'll continue to do so even now that the rule has been replealed.  It has little/nothing to do with recent results, auto-bids, or longevity of hockey fandom.  It's picking a measure that puts your program (in its entire history) in the best light.  

To suggest that postseason championships is an objectively better standard for judging a program's history is a bit disingenuous.  CCT's 9 first place finishes are very impressive, and I, for one, am envious of them.  Would I trade away Whitelaw's for Bedpans?  Not even if you offered 2-for-1, and I do think it's funny to refer to it as the bedpan, but only because I know a) who it was named for AND b) which team has the most.  If the RS trophy were named the Harkness Cup (as it very arguably should be), we wouldn't call it the bedpan even if we'd *never* won it and had 20 championships.  Similarly, we also wouldn't call it the bedpan if we'd won 10 of those along with our 10 championships.

[/q]

?  

The point I was making is that nobody recognized such a thing as a "regular season champion" until the NCAA gave an autobid for it.  So to look back, in hindsight, and say "geez, we won a bunch of regular season championships" pre-1990s is what's disingenuous.  Everyone can decide for himself which is a "better standard for judging a program's history," but what I'm telling you is that in the 60s, 70s, and 80s nobody gave any thought to being a "regular season champion."  What mattered to every team was winning the tournament, because that team was the champion.  Declaring yourself the winner of a championship that no one at the time viewed as a championship doesn't make a lot of sense--to me at least.

Clarkson fans can "tout" whatever they'd like.  It's their prerogative.  They should be very proud of Clarkson's consistent record over the years, and their ECAC seedings over 43 years are testament to that year-in, year-out consistency.

Seems to me we can refer to it as the "bedpan," "pisspot," "spittoon," or whatever sobriquet we'd like, for whatever reason we choose.

[jtwcornell91]

For that matter, finishing with the best record in the RS, or the #1 seed in the ECAC playoffs, meant even less before the Great Divorce, given how unbalanced the schedules were back then.

[Robb]

I definitely agree that it's not proper to refer to a first-place finish as a "championship," and that term may well have come into vogue because of the CC rule.  Even UVM, who would dearly love to hang a championship banner in Gutterson put one up that reads "first place" for the 1995-96 season.  The debate about whether it's more important than a tournament championship is still fun (and meaningless) no matter what you call it.

So I suppose that referring to the Cornell/Clarkson game on 1/26/01 as a "Alternate Belt" title game is disingenuous, too? ;-)

[Al DeFlorio]

[Q]Robb Wrote:

 I definitely agree that it's not proper to refer to a first-place finish as a "championship," and that term may well have come into vogue because of the CC rule.   [/q]
Exactly right.