Harvard(sucks) @ Lynah

[littleredfan]

I'm not sure about this, but i think that Harvard's beef has less to do with the fact that we have a home ice advantage and more to do with the fact that a player on their team got hit in the face by a piece of fish.

I'm all for the tradition, don't get me wrong, but honestly that just sucks.

Fish on the ice around the players = OK
Fish in the face of an opponent, no matter how hated = disrespectful

These guys have to then go out there and play 60 minutes of hockey, maybe with the stench of a little fish wedged somewhere in their jersey.

Sounds like it sucks.

[DeltaOne81]

Seems unlikely. Still good for a chuckle though :-).

"One of the guys", if I remember from last year, it didn't happen 'til mid-winter (like, January). Isn't it true (based on the deaming of the NCAA statistical lords), that RPI (the stat, not the school) isn't valid until everyone has played 20 games? And if RPI isn't, then PWR isn't.

Thinking of it now, 20 seems like too many, but it's some number like that - I shall search USCHO for the answer, which is where I believe I found it once.

-Fred

[Adam \'04]

I think it is very possible that Harvard could have filed a petition with the NCAA. ::laugh:: I would not discredit the source information just yet. I don't think that Harvard or Cornell will publicly make a big deal over Lynah. It really does not look good for either school to have this sort of thing in the press, if you know what I mean. ;-)

[jtwcornell91]

They're not terribly meaningful so early in the season, but I am ready to calculate them as an academic exercise, and have done so already.  But until everybody has a winning percentage which is neither .000 or 1.000, you can't assign everyone a finite KRACH on the same scale, which makes the presentation of the results complicated.  Once Cornell and Brown have both tied or lost (and not just tied each other, but that's another story) and Princeton and Huntsville have both won or tied, I'll start posting the RPI, PWR, and KRACH on http://slack.net/hockey/

[jtwcornell91]

DeltaOne81 '03 wrote:

"One of the guys", if I remember from last year, it didn't happen 'til mid-winter (like, January). Isn't it true (based on the deaming of the NCAA statistical lords), that RPI (the stat, not the school) isn't valid until everyone has played 20 games? And if RPI isn't, then PWR isn't.

RPI is defined as long as everyone has played at least two different opponents.  What you're probably thinking of is the requirement that a team play 20 games to be considered in tournament selection at all.

[littleredfan]

John: what happens if a team goes undefeated/untied or fails to win or tie a single game?

[jeh25]

John T. Whelan '91 wrote:

DeltaOne81 '03 wrote:

"One of the guys", if I remember from last year, it didn't happen 'til mid-winter (like, January). Isn't it true (based on the deaming of the NCAA statistical lords), that RPI (the stat, not the school) isn't valid until everyone has played 20 games? And if RPI isn't, then PWR isn't.

RPI is defined as long as everyone has played at least two different opponents.  What you're probably thinking of is the requirement that a team play 20 games to be considered in tournament selection at all.

Didn't the L16 component of the PWR use to be Last twenty? Maybe Fred is thinking of that?

[jtwcornell91]

John E Hayes '98 '00 wrote:

Didn't the L16 component of the PWR use to be Last twenty?

Yes, that used to coincide nicely with the minimum number of games (although it still didn't work out that way because independents like Air Force and Army would often play a bunch of games against Division I but at the time still ineligible teams like Canisius, which counted towards the 20-game minimum but not towards tournament selection).

Of course, the "last 16" criterion is now a thing of the past.

[gwm3]

The KRACH doesn't actually matter for anything does it?  I seem to remember a fews years ago Alabama-Huntsville leading the KRACH fairly deep into the season.

[DeltaOne81]

[Q]Of course, the "last 16" criterion is now a thing of the past.[/Q]
Um, is it? I thought that was the one they left alone. They had talked about altering or eliminating it, but they haven't yet.

Also, it's possible that I pulled the number 20 from the "20 min games" thing (not the last 20 games though, I haven't been around college hockey long enough). So is it possible USCHO doesn't post their stats until people start meeting this? Or is it just some randomly determined point in the winter? Maybe out very own Adam W can shed some light on that.

Either way, I know USCHO takes its sweet time to put up the statistical rankings. That's what we have JTW for :-)... among other things of course.

-Fred

[jtwcornell91]

Graham Meli '02 wrote:

The KRACH doesn't actually matter for anything does it?  I seem to remember a fews years ago Alabama-Huntsville leading the KRACH fairly deep into the season.

The KRACH is not used in the selection process.  We keep mentioning it because it does far more robustly what the RPI was designed to do: evaluate a team's won-lost-tied record in light of its strength of schedule.  Assumung your definition of "fairly deep into the season" means sometime after the beginning of the calendar year, I can recall no such anomaly in the KRACH, as opposed to the RPI, which had Quinnipiac at #12 at the end of the 1999 season and #11 at the end of the 2000 season.

[jtwcornell91]

DeltaOne81 '03 wrote:

[Q]Of course, the "last 16" criterion is now a thing of the past.[/Q]
Um, is it? I thought that was the one they left alone. They had talked about altering or eliminating it, but they haven't yet.

After far too much searching, I found the article:

http://www.uscho.com/news/2002/06/27_004475.php

Last 16 was dropped, the RPI weightings were switched back to 25/50/25, and "Team Under Consideration" was redefined to be anyone with an RPI of .500 or above.

[gwm3]

Yeah,  I don't remember exactly how far into the season the Alabama-Huntsville thing was (perhaps it was before any games had been played and the teams were just listed alphabetically).  I think it was at least a few weeks in, which would be fairly insignificant, but still strange.  Then again, maybe I dreamed all of this...  ::snore::

[jtwcornell91]

Graham Meli '02 wrote:

Yeah,  I don't remember exactly how far into the season the Alabama-Huntsville thing was (perhaps it was before any games had been played and the teams were just listed alphabetically).  I think it was at least a few weeks in, which would be fairly insignificant, but still strange.  Then again, maybe I dreamed all of this...  ::snore::

It was in November 2001, when UAH started out 9-1, with their only loss coming to 8-1-2 Western Michigan.  At that point, UAH was #1 in the KRACH and #3 in the RPI.  Then they started losing and dropped off the map.

So the strange thing was UAH's strong start, not the fact that KRACH (like other rating systems) judged them accordingly.

[kingpin248]

I think that should be November 2000.  When I saw 9-1, I immediately thought, "they'd (UAH) played ten games before they came to Lynah?"