To better help HOCKEY-Lers second-guess their teams themselves,
without my having to run a new PWR calculation by hand for each
what-if question, I've replaced
http://www.slack.net/~whelan/cgi-bin/tbrw.cgi?hypo with a form that
lets you change, add or remove any scores you like from the scores
database, and declare any combination of conference champions, and
then proceed through "You Are The Committee" with the pairwise
comparisons recalculated for that set of results.  Some notes:
 
* Unlike the conference tournament hypothetical pages, you have to
change the conference champions by hand; the script won't deduce them
from your scores.
 
* If you only care about the pairwise comparisons for a given set of
results, select '[unknown]' for all eight conference champions.  (If
you want to see all of the pairwise comparisons if a team with a
losing record is "under consideration" by virtue of winning an
automatic berth, you need to do it the hard way by looking at the HTML
source of any of the YATC pages.)
 
* The score-altering interface is not very user-friendly; you need to
write any new scores in the format given, which shouldn't be too hard
to imitate.  A key to abbreviations is included at the end; be
especially careful about Princeton (Pn, not Pr) and all those M-teams.
 
* Don't use the "automatic" button; aside from not eliminating the
MAAC teams, it uses an algorithm which we know is not quite what the
committee does, or Niagara would have made the tourney with the actual
comparisons!
 
Using the script, I managed to answer a few questions that had been on
my mind about under what circumstances the ECAC would have received
three bids:
 
* With a win or tie in the ECAC consolation game, Princeton makes the
tournament in place of Ohio State, but not if there is no consolation
at all.
 
* (This one is going to hurt.)  If RPI defeats Harvard two games to
none in the ECAC quintafinals rather than two games to one, they make
the field in place of Ohio State.  They do not if one game is a tie
and they win three points to one, however.
 
Other counterfactuals are left as an excercise to the reader.  Enjoy.
 
                                          John Whelan, Cornell '91
                                                  [log in to unmask]
                                     http://www.amurgsval.org/joe/
 
Play along at home at http://www.slack.net/~whelan/cgi-bin/tbrw.cgi?brack
 
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