Cheryl A. Morris wrote:
 
> Four Sub-Regionals probably offers the fairest solution to all the
teams
> involved.  And maybe you skew the seedings just a little to ensure
that
> the teams play close to home for the first round.  Two Sub-Regionals
of
> eight would make a great buy for the college hockey fan, but I'm not
sure
> there is any arena in the country that would want to schedule eight
games
> in a weekend.
>
> No matter how strong the allure to return to those old first round
> weekends in your home building, I think when you examine the reality,
it
> doesn't cut it.
 
On the contrary; I think your vision of a sub-regional doesn't pass the
reality test.  This whole discussion has blithely ignored the conditions
the
regionals operate under out here inthe west.  Why is a four team
tournament to
choose one entrance to the Final Four going to attract any more venue
interest
than four teams deciding two spaces?
 
I find the concept of a West Regional atthe Pepsi Center in Denver quite
 
amusing.  I happen to really like one of the Denver sports columnists
(Bob
Kravitz of the Rocky Mountain News) a lot, so I takea look at the RMN
sports
page most days.  The college hockey coverage appears to be limited to a
half-column recap of a previousday's game.  That's it.  It's not even
written
by an RMN writer; it appears to be a special addition by one of the
locals, if
it's an away game (the recaps of the DU-UMD series were by John
Gilbert).
This is a city where a 18,000 seat arena is going to sign up  for a
college
hockey event without knowing who the teams are going to be?
 
For better or for worse, West Regionals are stuck in campus venues.  Van
Andel
might be an exception, but I bet that's it.  And Iemphasize "might",
since it
hasn't looked like the one trip there was so wildly successful that the
NCAA
is falling over itself to have it there again.  Campus sites are the
only
places that are going to be willing to take the risk of hosting a
regional,and
then only with the assurance that local teams will be seeded there.
Otherwise, forget it.  And with the disaster in the making in a couple
of
months, even these sources might dry up.  I got another good belly laugh
out
of the earlier posting that, for the foreseeable future, Princeton and
Maine
are going to be a long ways from any regional.  Let's review the data
(the
following figures are from the Cyber Routerweb site):
 
Orono, ME is 4 hours and 30 minutes from Worcester, MA
 
Princeton, NJ is 3 hoursand 11 minutes from Albany, NY
 
How does this compare?
 
To date, the closest regional to the University of Minnesota has been
Madison,
which is listed as 4 hours and 15 minutes.  Duluth, Marquette, Houghton,
St.
Cloud and Grand Forks are all significantly farther than this, to say
nothing
of the Colorado schools.
 
Yes, some (though not all) of these will be brought closer once there is
a
regional in Minneapolis.  But right now, the pucker factor in the
Minnesota
athletic department has to be getting pretty high about said regional,
because
of the aforementioned situation developing in Wisconsin right now.  What
 
situation is this, you ask?  Take a look at the western standings.  Of
all of
the teams with a better than .500 record, the one that is geographically
 
closest to Madison is Notre Dame, which is 4 hours and 9 minutes.  And
I'm
sure that everyone in Madison can count on the fact that the Irish will
bring
a lot of fans with them for that 4 hour trip.  (Our list, after all, has
been
inundated with them.)  The next closest to Madison is Michigan State at
6
hours and 17 minutes.
 
Barring a miracle Badger comeback (I've written off the Gophers, though
their
RPI is higher), attendance at this year's West Regional is shaping up to
be a
disaster.  Ask yourselves how well attended an East Regional in Albany
would
be if the closest proven hockey power playing there were Maine (6 hours,
27
minutes).  No Cornell; no Clarkson; no upstate NY teams at all; no
Boston
teams.  Throw in Brown to capture the flavor of Notre Dame, even though
that
trip isn't much more than half as far (2 hours, 32 minutes).   I stand
by my
opinion that eastern fans have never really grasped just how far apart
things
are out here.
 
The sub-regionals at neutral venues idea is a pipe dream.  Forget it.
No
matter how many teams the tournament is made up of, the formatis going
to have
to rely on campus sites forthe western games.  The question is whether
you'd
rather have a situation like we have now, where the regionals are
scheduled in
advance and the host team is guaranteed to be there (if they're in the
tournament) or whether this is an advantage that ought to go to the
higher
seed.  I'll take the latter; even though I think what happened to North
Dakota
last year was a form of payback, in terms of the one season, it was
unfair and
should be avoided if at all possible.
 
J. Michael Neal
 
HOCKEY-L is for discussion of college ice hockey;  send information to
[log in to unmask], The College Hockey Information List.