NCAA bracketing affirmative action style -- loosen the rules?

DeltaOne81 · February 23, 2006, 07:49:03 PM

[quote Rita]Is there a mathematical way to that take into account some RPI factor of your league to compensate for the fact the top to bottom the Atlantic hockey is not as strong as the WCHA?[/quote]

Yeah, its possible. But the NCAA seems to be very hesitant to make the math more complicated than it already is.

[quote Rita]OK, I'll go back to my corner now and won't bring up L16/L20 anymore because I don't have time to do the math to see who would have benefited or been screwed by such a factor. ;-)[/quote]

Guess what this lets you add? http://www.slack.net/~whelan/tbrw/tbrw.cgi?2006/rankings.diy.shtml

In fact it even lets you add it KRACH weighted.

You can thank JTW later

Rita · February 23, 2006, 08:13:29 PM

[quote DeltaOne81][quote Rita]Is there a mathematical way to that take into account some RPI factor of your league to compensate for the fact the top to bottom the Atlantic hockey is not as strong as the WCHA?[/quote]

Yeah, its possible. But the NCAA seems to be very hesitant to make the math more complicated than it already is.

[quote Rita]OK, I'll go back to my corner now and won't bring up L16/L20 anymore because I don't have time to do the math to see who would have benefited or been screwed by such a factor. ;-)[/quote]

Guess what this lets you add? http://www.slack.net/~whelan/tbrw/tbrw.cgi?2006/rankings.diy.shtml

In fact it even lets you add it KRACH weighted.

You can thank JTW later

[/quote]

Unfortunately, I don't have time to fiddle with John's cool programs (I need to put together a poster for a conference), but I'll buy John a beer if he is in Estero in December. :-)

Al DeFlorio · February 23, 2006, 08:21:49 PM

[quote RichH]Good God, Bill. Among other things, you're becoming the Dan Rather of this board as well.[/quote]
Better that than Bill O'Reilly. ::rolleyes::

canuck89 · February 24, 2006, 01:39:54 AM

As a matter of fact, I was not aware due to my age. Thank you, though, for letting me know!

Trotsky · February 24, 2006, 07:47:36 AM

1) Get rid of the auto bids. Return the emphasis of the conferences, and of college hockey in general, to the *conference* tournaments. The worst thing that has happened to college sports is ESPNization -- obsession with the national championship. Return the NCAA tourny to its status as a "cherry on top," after the real business of the sport, the determination of the champions among the natural and historical rivalries, is accomplished.

2) Get rid of any non-deterministic seeding criteria. The .003/.002/.001 nonsense just leads to charges of obfuscation in order to play to favorites. Pick one deterministic ranking system (KRACH; whatever). Disband the "selection committee." The day the last conference final is played, everyone will be able to generate the field.

3) Get rid of the regionals. As long as there are regional sites, there will be biased and revenue-driven exceptions and policies. "The only way to prevent corruption in high places is to get rid of the high places."

4) Allow intra-conference meetings in any round. Strict 1/16, 2/15, etc...

5) Re-seed after each round. No fixed brackets -- the best survivor of the first round meets the worst survivor in the QF.

6) Make the 1R and QF best-of-three at the home seed.

7) Split all NCAA gate and rights fees equally among all D-1 programs.

ursusminor · February 24, 2006, 08:26:43 AM

[quote Trotsky]Return the NCAA tourny to its status as a "cherry on top," [/quote] Just like in 1985. A noble goal. :-D

[quote Trotsky]7) Split all NCAA gate and rights fees equally among all D-1 programs.[/quote] Would that include the non-D-I schools playing D-I hockey whom, last I heard, did not partipate in sharing receipts? (Maybe it's only the D-III schools.)

billhoward · February 24, 2006, 08:48:07 AM

Your nom de plume (nom de guerre?) is apt. You dreamer! Take the revenue out of venue? Make the NCAA title a nice endinig to the season? Split gate fees with the have-nots of the sport so they'd get better? Next you're going to want students in class Monday to at least Thursday? How's that going to play in Miami and Nebraska?

I do like the idea of reseeding going into the Frozen Four. (As the ECAC does.) That way you could tinker with some initial seedings and give the #1 seed (#1 survivor) an advantage going into the final weekend that it deserves if it's the #1 surviving ream. That's sort of an advantage to a team that did well during the RS.

OTOH, there's something in favor of the new status quo: We've grown accustomed to made for TV and extreme sports becoming real sports. And the televised championship showdowns that go with them. (American Idol is the same thing only different. Pure trash. Plus the cruelty of seeing the pain on someone else's face when they're told on national TV that they can't sing worth a lick. Something they should have been told a couple years earlier in private.) There are probably people on the forum who remember when ski slops banned snowboards. Now snowboarding is an Olypic sport and snowboard cross is not just a sport, it gives gold medals. And I think it's pretty cool to watch.

Trotsky · February 24, 2006, 09:25:46 AM

[quote billhoward]OTOH, there's something in favor of the new status quo: We've grown accustomed to made for TV and extreme sports becoming real sports. And the televised championship showdowns that go with them. ... There are probably people on the forum who remember when ski slops banned snowboards. Now snowboarding is an Olypic sport and snowboard cross is not just a sport, it gives gold medals. And I think it's pretty cool to watch.[/quote]

Snowboarding is a good example, though, since it is only in the Olympics because Americans only watch the Olympics if Americans are winning gold medals, and we suck in all the real sports, so we had to rig the system. (See also: allowing in the professionals and destroying the entire point of the Olympics).

I actually heard someone say, with a straight face, that because the TV ratings are low in the US for the Olympics that the Olympics are "in trouble." That's exactly ass-backwards. An event becomes important, *then* it attracts TV. If the event can't support the TV audience, fine, get rid of TV and let the event settle back to what it was before, don't change the event. The current philosophy is the equivalent of saying, "nobody wants to stay up until 3 am to know who wins the presidential election, so let's close the polls in California at noon."

TV is a fine and wonderful thing, but it is essentially parasitic, and like any parasite, if it doesn't exercise restraint, it kills off its host. The natural evolution of something governed by marketing and mass media is the evolution of TV news from 1960 to today. That's not a model *anything* else should adopt.

We now return you to the 18th century, in which I would have been much more happy.

Beeeej · February 24, 2006, 09:45:26 AM

[quote Trotsky]We now return you to the 18th century, in which I would have been much more happy.[/quote]

Except of course that in the 18th century, your laptop's keyboard would be lit by candlelight.

Beeeej

jtwcornell91 · February 24, 2006, 09:51:14 AM

[quote DeltaOne81][quote jtwcornell91]
Yes, but where the committee really screwed up that year was in ignoring individual comparisons and using straight PWR to place teams into the bands, which was unlike what was done in previous years. If they had focused on comparisons among teams in the tournament rather than irrelevant comparisons with non-tournament teams, OSU would have been a 4-seed instead of SCSU, and Minnesota and CC could have played OSU and one patsy, leaving the other one for Cornell. I'll let someone else look up the Hockey-L and/or eLF posts about it.[/quote]

I have a better idea... how about you invite some of the committee members over, and we can all watch you get into a 10 minute debate about it in which you confuse the hell out of them ::popcorn::

Ah, good memories...[/quote]

Yeah, if I'd realized I was going to take the podium, I would have composed my thoughts better.

Beeeej · February 24, 2006, 09:53:34 AM

My pleasure, and I thought you might not - because having known it, you might have assumed it was ditched for good reasons. At least that's what I assume. And the reasons can't have amounted only to "Now that it's 16 teams there's no time for three-game early rounds," because it was still 12 teams from 1992-2002 and the first round was only one game.

(Which sucked for its own reasons - not that Cornell could've necessarily beaten eventual champion North Dakota on the second night in 1997, but they'd at least have had a fair shot at it if they hadn't played Miami the night before while UND was into the honor bar.)

Beeeej

Trotsky · February 24, 2006, 09:56:41 AM

[quote Beeeej][quote Trotsky]We now return you to the 18th century, in which I would have been much more happy.[/quote]

Except of course that in the 18th century, your laptop's keyboard would be lit by candlelight.
[/quote]

Whale tallow. Don't exagerrate. ;-)

The primary problem of the 18th century (other than dentistry), is that Cornell didn't exist yet but Harvard did.

Bet we'd still have more fans, though.

Trotsky · February 24, 2006, 09:59:48 AM

[quote jtwcornell91]
Yeah, if I'd realized I was going to take the podium, I would have composed my thoughts better.[/quote]

John, no matter how well you organized your thoughts, the panelists would have been confused. Them trying to rationalize a system of which they had no comprehension was the greatest "Emperor's New Clothes" moment I've ever witnessed.

billhoward · February 24, 2006, 10:12:12 AM

Ah, another NCAA anachronism: I believe Final Four teams once played one semifinal game Thursday and one game Friday in advance of the Saturday title game.

Trotsky · February 24, 2006, 10:22:20 AM

[quote billhoward]Ah, another NCAA anachronism: I believe Final Four teams once played one semifinal game Thursday and one game Friday in advance of the Saturday title game.[/quote]

Cornell knows this. All. Too. Well. :-(