Quinnipiac is IN

[Weingarm]

20-12-5 Quinnipiac moves on to the NCAA tourney today due to their win over Mercyhurst in the MACC championship.
QC is #23 in PWR and #25 in RPI

[Al DeFlorio]

And #50 in ability.::rolleyes::

A throng of 450 (according to USCHO--optimistic estimate, I'd bet) watched this much-anticipated game.

[Weingarm]

OC was up 4-0 at the end of the 2nd period.  With 4 minutes left in the 3rd, they were up 5-4.  Does anyone find this amusing?
Either Mercyhurst has an amazing offense or QCs defense stinks like rotten meat.
When will they finally expand the tourney to 16 teams so more competitive teams may play for the championship?

[KeithK]

I don't understand why everyone assumes that a larger tournament is better. Why does the addition of 3 more bubble teams (I'd guess that the CHA will get a bid after expansion) make it such a better tournament?  Right now the teams benfiting would be UAF, NMU, WMU and/or UML.  None are world beaters they're all pretty much middling teams from their conferences.

The only reasonable argument in my mind is to allow more teams other than the usual suspects to play in the tourney.  Includion.  But I reject that argument.  Everyone's got a chance to be there.

[ugarte]

RPI beat Clarkson.
Michigan beat OSU (bad day for OSU!)

Enjoy playing with these new results in the script.

[Tom Hamill \'85]

The appeal to me of 16 games is that everyone is on equal footing.  I don't think this year that there is going to be much of a difference between the top 4 who get a bye and the next bunch of five or six.  I think it's a pretty big disadvantage to play 2 games back to back while your opponent is fresh. With 16, this problem is gone.

A few years ago we saw this with NoDak in the NCAAs. We had played against, hmm, Miami of Ohio, I believe, the day before.  We had the legs to keep up with NoDak for about two periods, and then we folded from fatigue. Elliott played out of his mind, but the team in front of him was exhausted.

[nshapiro]

Has anyone else noticed that our first round game got WAY easier because we lost to Hahvahd (still sucks)?

If we beat them, we probably would have beend 3East and would play someone imported from out west who would certainly have been more of a test than QC

[Beeeej]

NoDak was also simply the better team that day.  They did win the national championship two games later; there's no shame in having lost to them, especially after playing the night before.

And the answer to the original question which didn't actually get answered:  Yes, there will apparently soon be a 16-team tourney.  Or at least the proposal has finally been submitted in a manner official enough to be considered properly.

Beeeej

[Josh '99]

We were talking about this...  my guess (someone else can check the script if they want) is that if we'd beaten Harvard (sucks), we'd have gotten 3E, Maine would've had 4E, Alaska-Fairbanks (highest PWR that didn't get a bid) would've had 5E (and this also doesn't hurt the travel restriction any because they'd have to fly no matter where they went) and Quinnipiac would've had 6E, resulting in us still playing Quinnipiac.

[Weingarm]

So is it definite that if we'd beaten Harvard we wouldn't have gotten a bye?

[KeithK]

Yes, the bye advantage is a bad thing.  But it's easily fixed without going to 16 teams.  Do campus sites for the first two rounds. Or make the regionals Thursday-Saturday and Friday-Sunday.  Or drop down to 8 teams...

[KeithK]

Yes. We couldn't have passed BU to get into the top 4 without beating a TUC team in the final (i.e. Clarkson).  That would've given us the Minnesota comparison in addition to the CC, UM and Maine comps we would've won by virtue of higher RPI with two wins.  That might've given us a bye.  As it was, best chance was for a #3 east seed. Since #4E and #3 east are pretty interchangeable, the loss didn't hurt us appreciably in terms of the tournament.  Losing the Whitelaw to those %@$&@#%$ from Cambridge hurts  plenty though.

[jtwcornell91]

I also came to the conclusion that we would still have been paired with Quinnipiac, but the difference between a 3 and 4 seed would have been being bracketed to play BU rather than UNH in the second round, which would have meant both an easier draw and a lot more fun!  God damn, why did we have to lose to Hahvahd!

Anyway, as it is now, we're bracketed to play BU in the semis in St. Paul if we both make it that far.

[KeithK]

Well, we shouldn't have predicted that a #3 seed would end up with a BU bracket because the other bracket would've had an expected UNH-Maine second round matchup, a replay of the HEA championship.  The committee in past years had tried to avoid that situation and I think a BU-Maine matchup would've been preferable, leaving Cornell bracketed against UNH anyway (the theory being that a semi rematch in better than a final rematch).  But then again, if they had followed the old rules about avoiding interconference matchups - which were very good rules IMNSHO - they probably would've sent Maine out West to avaoid the all HEA second round games and brought CC or St. Cloud (or both) east.  Of course, the morons making the brackets now think that hacing an all east regional is better so clearly avoiding inter-conference matchups was not a concern.

Sorry, just had  to cent a bit.

What annoys me is how guys like Jack McDonald make comments like "I think we have very good brackets" and "we may now have sellouts" blah blah blah.  Almost no one seems to think the brackets and regionalism are a good idea.  I find it hard to believe that the committee does.  It seems clear to me that they were just following the rules handed down from on high about travel - for whatever reason they chose not to follow them rigorously.  Why not just give the reason and leave it at that?  I hate all the spinning.  Acting like damn politicans...

Sorry. Had to vent a little more.

[CowbellGuy]

And of course the biggest travesty that comes out of this is that Eastern teams are going to have only one chance (in the NCAA championship game) to wrestle the champ belt back from the West. :-D