RIT to go D-I

[Al DeFlorio]

[Q]KeithK Wrote:

Albany is the winner here with both UVM and QC.  Hartford is actually not much better than Lake Placid with the Cats in the league.
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Albany still wins.  Hartford is actually worse than Lake Placid because of all of the North Country/UVM appearances.
[/q]
A rare wise decision by the ECAC. B-] B-] B-]

[KeithK]

I thought about doing a geometric centroid.  I assume that you can find longtitude/latitude data for various cities on the web easily enough.  But geometric center isn't the right answer because it's driving time/distance that matters, not distance as the crow flies.

I do agree that a straight mean is probably too simple.  But it's not obvious what the right metric is.

Since it's easy enough to do, here are the numbers using the median:

City             with UVM       with QC
-----------    Dist   Time    Dist   Time
Albany        158.8   2:50   157.3   2:43
Hartford      160.5   2:43   140.1   2:16
Springfield   159.3   2:43   113.6   1:52
Lake Placid   188.5   3:53   240.9   4:24

Using this metric Springfield is the clear winner with QC in the mix.

Using a trimmed mean (cutting out top 2 and bottom 2) gives:

City             with UVM       with QC
-----------    Dist   Time    Dist   Time
Albany        157.0   2:49   156.2   2:44
Hartford      166.8   2:49   158.1   2:41
Springfield   150.3   2:34   142.8   2:27
Lake Placid   196.7   3:36   206.8   3:55

Springfield is again the winner., though the margin is not as pronounced.

Still thinking about how to weight medians and trimmed means in a meaningful way.  Also, one could weight the schools based on size of travelling fan base (subjective judgement here) as well as tournament appearances.

[ben03]

Call me crazy ... but somehow I don't think anyone in the league office went to nearly this
much trouble when they picked Albany as the our new post season home. ::shifty:: ::nut:: ::shifty::

[Josh '99]

I'm pretty sure there's somewhere on the web you can look up lat/long for just about anywhere.

[David Harding]

[Q]jmh30 Wrote:

 I'm pretty sure there's somewhere on the web you can look up lat/long for just about anywhere.[/q]
Here are a few, courtesy of Google:
http://www.astro.com/atlas
http://www.zipinfo.com/search/zipcode.htm
http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/gazetteer

[jeh25]

[Q]jmh30 Wrote:

 I'm pretty sure there's somewhere on the web you can look up lat/long for just about anywhere.[/q]

Well, Keith is right that the lat/long isn't useful, because the scary calculus based solution would give straight line distances, meaning that in the worse case, the midpoint between Princeton and Brown is probably somewhere in Long Island Sound.

I think I came up with 2 better metrics while sleepling, but it will take me a little while to pull  together the numbers. For what it is worth, I might gonna exclude Quinnipiac to save time, since the decision to move to Albany was made prior to their joining the league.

Also, I'd agree that this whole discussion is academic as a gut check says that Albany is closer to the 4 schools (Cornell, SLU, Clarkson and UVM) that actually sent fans in the 90s. So yes, Ben is almost certainly correct that the league office didn't put this much time and thought into it.

[adamw]

Addressing Bill Howard upthread ... Last year's decision by D-III to continue to allow D-III schools to participate has nothing to do with this situation.  That only affected the schools already with D-I programs that awarded scholarships.  It was grandfathered for them.

RIT will not be allowed to give scholarships, now or in the future.  That is, unless they move their entire athletic program to Division I --- which is possible one day, but not right now.

[KeithK]

John, it's only a "scary calculus based solution" if you have distributed masses.  If you use point masses it's just vector algebra.  Well, I suppose if you want to use the real surface of the earth (instead of a a flat approximation) it's more complicated.

I'm sure this is more math/effort than the league office put into this decision.  but isn't that what forums like this are for?  Probably no one in a league has ever put in the effort to calculate something like the championship belt going back to the 1800's either. :-)

[Robb]

Or D-II.  Of course, that might actually be more expensive than D-I, once they factored in the greater travel expenses due to a dearth of nearby D-II programs...

[Robb]

I think what you'd really want is to generate a lat/long/predicted attendance table for each school, naturally taking into account the routing of major highways - you'd get more Cornell fans at a podunk town in western Mass that's on I-90 than at a site that's an equivalent distance (or equivalent travel time) away that's harder to get to.  Once you develop the attendance map for each school, you just weight them by historical apperances and then superimpose to find the ideal location to build a new rink suitable for hosting purposes - assuming it falls sufficiently far away from Albany/Springfield to require a new rink...

I bet that Boston would do surprisingly well under this method - probably better than Albany.  Boston is a good draw for most schools, and a great draw for enough schools (including Cornell, which is one of the farthest schools) that the superposition would create a very high spike in predicted attendance.  Since HEA has the Fleet, perhaps we could have the ECACHL tourney at Agganis?

[jeh25]

Okay. So I thought of a couple of approaches of thinking about this problem, the first approach being the more visual and the second being more statistical. I'll only cover the visual stuff here.

Anywho, since travel time, not straight line or highway miles, matters most, I focused there.

First, I asked how the distribution of travel times is spread about the mean. To do this I just calculated a difference score between each school's travel time and the _mean_ for that city.

[jeh25]

Okay. So I thought of a couple of approaches of thinking about this problem, the first approach being the more visual and the second being more statistical. I'll only cover the visual stuff here.

Anywho, since travel time, not straight line or highway miles, matters most, I focused there. However, I should point out that mapquest gives some non-optimal times. For example, it refused to use Rt17/I84 to points east from Ithaca and did I88 to I90 or I81 to 84 instead.

First, I asked how the distribution of travel times is spread about the mean. To do this I just calculated a difference score between each school's travel time and the _mean_ for that city.

Thus I got this:

 


And this:

 

Pretty much all these say is that Union and RPI like Albany and that Cornell, Clarkson, and SLU are screwed no matter what.

Then I thought, what would happen to travel times if you decided to move the tourney from Albany to Springfield.

This where things get interesting. Moving the tourney from Albany to Springfield has mean change in travel time of +19 minutes, yet Springfield is a better location. Huh?

With UVM in the league, 5 schools are within 100 minutes of Springfield, while only 2 are within 100 minutes of Albany. Similar trends are seen with a 2.5 hr window, 6 vs. 4 schools.


 


With Quinnipiac in the league, the case is similar, with 6 schools within 100 min of Springfield whereas only 2 are within 100 min of Albany.  Again, the 2.5 hr window shows the same thing, 7 vs 5 schools.

 

In other words, given that diehard fans are already gonna travel  4+ hours to get to the tourney, shouldn't the league maximize it's proximity to more casual fans.  

Or as Robb might say, move closer to Boston.

[Robb]

[Q]jeh25 Wrote:
In other words, given that diehard fans are already gonna travel  4+ hours to get to the tourney, shouldn't the league maximize it's proximity to more casual fans.  

Or as Robb might say, move closer to Boston.[/q]

Exactly!

[Will]

I'm all for moving the tourney to Boston, because there's always stuff to do there.  But isn't Springfield kind of a craphole?

[jeh25]

[Q]Will Wrote:
 But isn't Springfield kind of a craphole?[/q]

And Albany isn't?

If it can't be in Lake Placid, it may as well be in place that is centrally located.