Derek Hodgins:
 
>>> Look at the basketball tourney, those questions still come up. Does
>>> Southwest Missouri State at 23-2 or Michigan at 17-13 deserve to be in.
 
>>> Looking at last year, I think that a team like QU deserves that spot for
>>> their play over an at-large like Denver.
 
Eric Burton:
 
>> The answer to the first question should be with out a doubt yes, your
>> talking about a big ten school opposed to a team SMSU that plays in a second
>> tier league. Same goes for QU, until they prove they can beat someone like a
>> BU or BC or Michigan, Minnesota, UND Wisconsin or some one other than a
>> second tier team I say no.
 
In light of my response to Derek, let me further clarify my position
on this issue.  I emphatically do *not* believe that Quinnipiac,
Niagara or anyone else should be excluded from the tournament simply
because they play in a "second tier" conference.  The sort of
brand-naming associated with saying that the CHA and MAAC are
automatically weak and that BU, BC, Michigan, Minn, UND, Wisc, etc are
the teams one must beat to be tournament-worthy is completely
unjustified when the season hasn't even started yet.  What I'm saying
is that the NCAA needs to use a method of rating teams which is not
fooled by weak and especially by insular schedules like the MAAC's
last season.
 
Derek again:
 
> Then why bother having teams that have no shot at a national
> championship even play? Well, there goes 2/3rds of Division-I for
> college basketball. And as much as I love the Mid-American Conference,
> why bother allowing them to compete, even if they go undefeated, they
> still have no shot to win it all.
 
Which is why we need something more accurate than RPI and the current
PWR (heavily based on winning percentages) to assess teams'
performances.  If QC had gone undefeated last season, they would
certainly have deserved an NCAA bid, arguably even the second Eastern
bye.  The point is that it if your schedule is weak, it doesn't take
many losses to show that you're not that strong a team.
 
> I'm trying to bring D-I hockey to Syracuse right now and they response I
> get is, it's going to cost too much to put together a national
> championship contender so try?
 
As an aside, something is wrong with their philosophy if they think
the only reason to play in D1 is to contend for the national
championship.  But then I suppose that's what SU is accustomed to in
Bruteball and Squeakball.
 
> When I say that we could put together a
> MAAC competitive team like Niagara, they only think of why bother to do
> it if you can't be a national contender. This obviously isn't the point
> of collegiate sports. So give the champion of the MAAC and CHA a bid to
> the tourney. Yeah, there's a snowball's chance in hell that they'll win
> but just think of all those march madness upsets.....can you remember
> last year....Niagara over Michigan.
 
The problem I have with this argument is that it could be used to
justify giving the final few bids to *anyone*; the whole point of
at-large bids is that they should be given to the best teams based on
their performance during the season.
 
OTOH, I think automatic bids for conference champions are a good
thing, as they reward teams not just for winning over the course of
the season, but for winning the "big games" and it seems appropriate
that once winning a D1 conference championship a team should proceed
to the next level.  But it's sort of unbalanced to have up to 10
automatic bids and as few as 2 at-large ones, not to mention the
likely disparity between the two teams losing at-large bids in this
scenario and the CHA and MAAC champions taking their places.  That's
why it's imperative to convince the NCAA powers that be to allow an
expansion of the hockey tourney (preferably to a more convenient
number like 16 teams) by the time the new conferences finish their
shake-down.
 
Me:
 
>> The only reason anyone
>> thought of giving them an at-large bid was that the RPI and PWR
>> systems used by the NCAA do a bad job of rating teams in the presence
>> of widely varying schedule strengths.
 
Greenie:
 
> Actually, I felt they deserved the bid simply on the idea that ANY team, at
> ANY level, that goes 23-3-2 is doing a damn fine job.
 
That sort of perception is what causes Division I-A football powers to
schedule patsy out-of-conference games, knowing that the pollsters'
first-order perceptions will be based on won-lost record.
 
> If they don't belong, then they shouldn't be considered D1. As long as they
> are, they have as much right to the title as anyone else.
 
And I think everyone in D1 *should* be judged equally with respect to
at-large bids.  That's impossible without an accurate assessment of
each team's performance given the strength of their schedule; the
current approach of using a rating which benefits teams playing in
weak conferences and then having the committee subjectively correct
for that by not picking those teams is fair to no one.  (As long as
the new conferences perform very poorly against the established ones,
the results of this method will be the more or less the same as those
of a more objective one, but if the system isn't fixed before the
distinction becomes fuzzier, there'll be some serious problems.)
 
                                          John Whelan, Cornell '91
                                                  [log in to unmask]
                                     http://www.amurgsval.org/joe/
 
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