Paula's comments are hers and USCHO is not in the business of censoring
opinions.  Even if the entire rest of the USCHO staff disagreed with her,
we'd still defend her right to her opinion.
 
I'm not sure what John Painter and Keith Instone have to do with this --
since it's really just opinion.  Doing an overly technical analysis of her
column is really rather pointless.
 
Hope everyone is enjoying the regionals ... that's the most important thing.
A team's seeding, other than the byes, is really not that big a deal anyway.
Since all matchups are created to avoid intra-conference games, seedings are
constantly re-shuffled anyway.
 
AW
 
 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Sunday, March 26, 2000 6:48 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Cc: [log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask];
> [log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask]
> Subject: NCAA seeding comments in USCHO CCHA column
>
>
> My attention was recently drawn to Paula Weston's CCHA preview this
> week on USCHO at
> <http://www.uscollegehockey.com/news/ccha/preview.html>, which seems
> to imply that the CCHA received unfair treatment in the NCAA seeding
> process.  Since there are a number of specious or downright misleading
> statements both in the article and the quotes by the head coaches of a
> couple of CCHA teams, I'm quoting the relevant section here and
> challenging the questionable statements as they come up:
>
> > [Last Sunday] the NCAA showed the CCHA what cold is all about.
> >
> > Seed #5, East and West.
> >
> > No one around the league is arguing that more than two CCHA teams
> > should go to the NCAA's Big Dance. But to have both teams
> seeded fifth
> > seems a bit of a slap in the face.
> >
> > Not once in the history of the NCAA Tournament has a
> regular-season or
> > conference tournament champion with 26 wins been seeded lower than
> > fourth, nor one with 27 wins seeded lower than third. In fact, the
> > nearest stat is Bowling Green's third seeding in 1988, when the
> > Falcons went 27-11-2.
>
> Total number of wins is a dubious measure even of a team's overall
> record, since it doesn't consider the number of games lost and tied.
> Presumably it's done here to exclude ECAC and especially Ivy teams
> with fewer games on their schedule who were seeded low after winning
> the regular season or tournament championship.
>
> > Through Saturday, March 18, Michigan had earned 26 wins and the
> > regular-season title; Michigan State had 27 wins and a tournament
> > championship to its name.
> >
> > Maine finished fourth in Hockey East, won the conference
> championship
> > on a questionable goal, earned one win less than did Michigan State,
> > and got a first-round bye.
>
> I'm not aware that the NCAA has ever looked at whether a game-winning
> goal was "questionable" or not; all that matters is who won the game.
> Besides which, Maine's performance over the course of the season would
> have warranted the #1 East seed even if they had lost the HE
> championship game.
>
> > (For those of you not up to speed, the Spartans posted back-to-back
> > shutouts to decisively and without question capture the CCHA
> > tournament championship.)
> >
> > New Hampshire finished second in Hockey East, won neither the
> > regular-season championship nor the tourney title, had four
> fewer wins
> > than Michigan State and three fewer than Michigan, and is a third
> > seed, facing Niagara.
>
> To tell the full story of each team's won-lost-tied record, Michigan
> was 26-9-4 for a winning percentage of .718, Michigan State 26-10-4
> (one of their 27 wins was against Division II Alabama-Huntsville,
> games against whom are not considered for NCAA selection) or .700,
> Maine 26-7-5 or .750, and New Hampshire 23-8-6 or .703.  So even
> without taking into account the stronger schedules that Maine and UNH
> faced as members of Hockey East, Maine had more points in fewer games
> than either CCHA team, while UNH's overall winning percentage was
> between Michigan's and Michigan State's.
>
> > Even Boston College--with neither a tourney nor regular-season
> > title--was seeded higher than both Michigan and Michigan State.
>
> With the exception of the automatic bye for winning both championships
> in a conference, the selection committee does not consider where a
> team placed in their conference regular season or playoffs in seeding,
> only that team's performance based on all their games, conference,
> non-conference and playoffs.  There's a good reason for this, namely
> that the #1 or 2 team in a weaker conference may not be as strong as
> the #3 or 4 team in another one, and to focus on what place they each
> achieved in their respective conferences punishes teams for playing in
> stronger conferences.  We in the ECAC have been familiar with this
> reality for years.
>
> > This year marks just the fourth year the CCHA tournament
> champion has
> > been seeded lower than third (Bowling Green, 1988, W4; Lake
> Superior,
> > 1995, E5; Michigan, 1999, E5).
> >
> > Only once before have any conference's regular-season and playoff
> > champions both been seeded fifth or lower, in 1998 when Yale was the
> > West's fifth seed, and Princeton the West's sixth. Princeton won the
> > ECAC tourney championship as the No. 7 seed that year, with a record
> > of 18-10-7.
> >
> > All of this rankles a few people in this here neck of the woods, but
> > both Ron Mason and Red Berenson are taking the high road.
> >
> > "The bottom line is we have to win. It doesn't matter who we play,"
> > says Mason. "You know you're going to play good teams. We
> have won in
> > the past. Teams in our league have won on a national level."
> >
> > Berenson echoes Mason's sentiments, and adds that where the
> Wolverines
> > play isn't an issue.
> >
> > "It's really not East vs. West when you look at the map," says
> > Berenson. "Both venues are equidistant from here, so it's not like
> > we're missing a chance to go to Grand Rapids. Geographically, it
> > really doesn't matter."
> >
> > What both coaches will point to as an issue is where the Wolverines
> > and Spartans finished in the Pairwise rankings, and how
> such rankings
> > are determined. Neither Mason nor Berenson will point a
> finger at the
> > NCAA per se, but this year the selection criteria are being called
> > into question.
> >
> > "When Niagara and Quinnipiac finish ahead of Michigan and Michigan
> > State, something needs to be redefined," says Mason. "There
> has to be
> > something in the numbers that better recognizes strength of
> schedule,
> > that recognizes league strength."
>
> Some of us have been saying for some time that the case of the MAAC
> and now CHA points out deeper shortcomings in the selection criteria.
> Several criteria do not consider strength of schedule, and others
> define it mostly on the basis of the winning percentage of one's
> opponents, which can be misleading.  The effect is that teams playing
> weaker schedules, in particular those playing in weaker conferences,
> are overvalued in the NCAA's pairwise comparisons.  The NCAA is
> adjusting for this ad hoc at the moment by discounting comparisons won
> by teams from overly weak conferences, but if the criteria were
> adjusted for strength of schedule, it would be fair to return to a
> conference-blind analysis.
>
> Here's the catch when applying this to the CCHA: the CCHA is not,
> based on their overall performance, a strong conference this year.  At
> <http://www.slack.net/~whelan/cgi-bin/tbrw.cgi?pairwise$confstr> I
> give several tables of measures of conference strength.  Head-to-head,
> members of the CCHA were 7-10 against Hockey East, 12-15-1 against the
> WCHA, 11-10-2 against the ECAC, and 1-2-1 against Division I members
> of College Hockey America.  The last is deceptive because it includes
> only games against Niagara, but by most measures the order of strength
> of the conferences is 1.HE 2.WCHA 3.CCHA 4.ECAC 5.CHA 6.MAAC, with the
> gaps between 1 and 2 and between 3 and 4 being smaller than the
> others.  For instance, the KRACH ratings allow us to define the
> predicted winning percentage of any team against any other team; if
> the Division I members of each conference played one game each against
> each of the D1 members of each other conference, the CCHA would
> accumulate a winning percentage of .369 against Hockey East, .377
> against the WCHA, .526 against the ECAC, .732 against the CHA and .935
> against the MAAC.
>
> > Niagara, you may recall, cleaned up in a league with such
> powerhouses
> > as Army and Bemidji State, in a league with just six teams, in a
> > league where some conference games are worth four points.
>
> First, Bemidji State is not Division I this year, so Niagara's games
> against them were not considered by the selection committee; the same
> goes for Alabama-Huntsville and Findlay.  The only CHA games which
> contributed to Niagara's selection criteria were the four regular
> season and one playoff game against Air Force, and the two regular
> season games against Army.  (These did cause Niagara to have a
> somewhat weak schedule, from which they benefitted in the pairwise,
> about which more later.)  Second, why does it matter that the CHA has
> six teams?  Only three of them are Division I, which means that in
> fact Niagara's schedule was not dominated by conference play the way
> for example Quinnipiac's was.  And third, the four-point games only
> counted double for the CHA standings, which were irrelevant to
> tournament selection; for NCAA purposes, they were just ordinary
> games, and in fact meant that Niagara's schedule was not padded with
> two extra contests against Army.  The purpose of this paragraph is
> presumably to belittle College Hockey America, but Niagara was not
> awarded an at-large berth because they "cleaned up" in the CHA; it was
> because of their performance in all their Division I games.
>
> Besides which, neither Michigan nor Michigan State suffered at the
> hands of either Quinnipiac or Niagara.  While both CCHA teams lost
> their pairwise comparisons with QC and NU, the committee recognized
> those comparisons as inaccurate by leaving QC out of the tournament
> altogether and seeding Niagara sixth in the West despite their
> comparison wins over MSU and BC.  (The one team with a valid gripe
> against Niagara's seeding is the other MSU, Minnesota State-Mankato,
> who would have made the tournament in the Purple Eagles' place.
> Niagara outperformed Mankato in all of the NCAA's criteria except
> head-to-head, but all of those wins, aside from common opponents, are
> suspect.  For example, Niagara's last 16 games included only two
> against teams who ended the season with non-losing records, one of
> whom was Canisius, while half of Mankato's last 16 games were against
> .500 or better teams.  Similarly, Niagara's Ratings Percentage Index
> is inflated by five games against Air Force, while Mankato played a
> full WCHA schedule.) The point of Mason's statement is presumably to
> call into question any and all pairwise comparisons based on the
> NCAA's criteria, given that the formula produced anomalous results for
> the CHA and MAAC teams.  This is a valid point, but again irrelevant
> to the seeding of the CCHA teams.
>
> Michigan State were seeded 5th in the West because they lost their
> PWCs to New Hampshire and Boston College.  Why did they?  Well,
> looking either at USCHO's file of all the comparisons
> <http://www.uscollegehockey.com/rankings/19992000/comparisons.txt> or
> the popup breakdowns on my College Hockey Ranking Systems page at
> <http://www.slack.net/~whelan/cgi-bin/tbrw.cgi?rankings$pwc> we see
> that UNH held the advantage over MSU in the Ratings Percentage Index
> .592 to .563 (we've already observed that they accumulated a slightly
> lower winning percentage against stronger competition), while
> accumulating a better record against Teams Under Consideration (11-6-2
> to 8-5-2) and Common Opponents (3-1 to 5-2-2); MSU had a better record
> than UNH in their last 16 games (10-3-3 versus 6-5-5), which still
> gives UNH the comparison three criteria to one.  Looking at the
> breakdown of opponents at
> <http://www.slack.net/~whelan/cgi-bin/tbrw.cgi?crit.MS> or
> <http://www.slack.net/~whelan/cgi-bin/tbrw.cgi?Kcrit.MS>
> <http://www.slack.net/~whelan/cgi-bin/tbrw.cgi?crit.NH> or
> <http://www.slack.net/~whelan/cgi-bin/tbrw.cgi?Kcrit.NH> we see that
> New Hampshire's schedule in the relevant games is at least as strong
> as Michigan State's.  BC and Michigan State is a little closer, with
> the Eagles capturing two criteria (RPI, .584 to .563, and Last 16,
> 12-4 to 10-3-3) and the Spartans two (vs TUC 8-5-2 to 8-8-1 and Common
> Opponents 3-0 to 2-1), but BC taking the comparison due to a higher
> RPI.  Looking at
> <http://www.slack.net/~whelan/cgi-bin/tbrw.cgi?crit.BC> or
> <http://www.slack.net/~whelan/cgi-bin/tbrw.cgi?Kcrit.BC> we see that
> strength of schedule corrections would if anything tip the balance
> further in BC's favor, as the Eagles accumulated their record against
> a tougher schedule of TUCs, going 5-6-1 in 12 games against teams who
> actually made the tournament and 3-2 in 5 games against other TUCs,
> while the Spartans were 1-3-1 in 5 games against other tourney
> participants and 7-2-1 in 10 games against other TUCs.
>
> On to Michigan, who received a 5 seed in the East because they lost
> comparisons to Boston University and Colgate.  The BU-Michigan
> comparison sees the Wolverines with the advantage against common
> opponents (4-1 to 3-1-1) while the Terriers have a better RPI (.583 to
> .568) and record in their last 16 (10-3-3 to 9-3-4) and both teams are
> .500 against teams under consideration.  Again, looking at strength of
> schedule only makes BU's case better.  Finally, we come to
> Colgate-Michigan, the one case where a CCHA team can argue that the
> current criteria unfairly judge them.  With Michigan holding the
> advantage against Common Opponents (5-1-1 vs 4-3) and Colgate having
> the upper hand vs TUCs (11-4 vs 5-5-3) and in the last 16 games
> (12-2-2 vs 9-3-4), the comparison comes down to the RPI, in which
> Colgate has slight edge, .570 to .568.  Since one of Colgate's
> opponents was Niagara, who are slightly overvalued as an opponent due
> to a high winning percentage and opponents' opponents' winning
> percentage, their RPI may be a touch higher than they deserve.  At any
> rate, the KRACH ratings, which rank Niagara #18 and Quinnipiac #44
> without special provisions for their conference but otherwise look
> roughly like the RPI, show Michigan slightly better than Colgate,
> 323.1 to 312.5.  So if RPI were replaced with KRACH, Michigan would be
> seeded higher than Colgate.  However, Michigan is seeded higher than
> St. Cloud in the East Regional because they win that pairwise
> comparison.  Applying the same scrutiny to the Michigan-SCSU
> comparison shows that the deciding factor is Michigan's higher RPI;
> using KRACH in its place would give the comparison to St. Cloud, so
> Michigan would remain a 5 seed, with SCSU and Colgate trading places.
> (Intraconference matchups would also come into play, but then if
> strength of schedule corrections were made to the pairwise
> comparisons, SCSU would likely not have been sent East in the the
> first place.)
>
> > "I think our league is pretty strong from top to bottom,
> and it's big.
> > Half the teams in our league--in any league as big as
> ours--are going
> > to have .500 records or below. But those teams are solid."
> >
> > Berenson says that he's sure the seeding issue "will be debated."
>
> I hope so, but I hope it's done with substantive discussions about the
> shortcomings of the system and not just convenient arguments trying to
> make a case to improve one's own league's seeds.  For example, this
> article started off arguing that the top two CCHA teams should not be
> seeded below teams finishing third or fourth in Hockey East, and then
> went on to blame the Pairwise for ranking teams like Niagara and
> Quinnipiac too highly for being from weak conferences.  Well, fixing
> the flaws in the criteria are only going to improve the standing of
> teams from strong conferences, of which the CCHA was not one this
> season, which is why MSU and Michigan State were seeded below those
> Hockey East teams even using the current system.
>
> > "It's hard to imagine that a team that did not finish in first place
> > or took a conference title finished ahead of Michigan and Michigan
> > State. The thing that seemed to kill us this year was our Pairwise.
>
> Well, yes, because the pairwise comparisons are based on criteria
> which consider performance in all games, not just relative to the rest
> of one's conference.  Neither the CCHA, nor any other conference, is
> entitled to favorable seeds in the tournament if the current season's
> results do not warrant it.
>
> > "Our bottom teams were good. We lost games to Bowling Green, Ferris
> > State, Alaska-Fairbanks, Omaha--all good teams."
>
> Whoa, hang on a minute.  By what measure is Alaska-Fairbanks a "good
> team"?  They finished 5-25-2, with an RPI of .383 (52nd out of 54
> teams) and 43rd in the nation in the KRACH.  Michigan Tech was the
> only major conference team to finish worse in any of those three
> categories.
>
> > Berenson says that he thinks the CCHA itself received little respect
> > this season, and he's not sure why. "I don't know if it's a combo of
> > the cluster schedule, or how our league did in interleague play, but
> > for some reason on paper we came up short.
>
> The CCHA's seeding had nothing to do with respect, and everything to
> do with their performance on the ice this season.  The numbers on
> papers were derived from this season's actual game results.  Berenson
> is right that interleague play had a lot to do with the CCHA's poor
> seeding in the tournament; how else are we to know how good CCHA teams
> are relative to teams from the WCHA, ECAC, or any other conference?
>
> > "They [the NCAA] may have to reconsider the formula."
>
> Some of us have already put forth a proposal (before this season
> began, in fact): replace RPI with KRACH (which does what RPI tries to
> do, only without being tripped up by weak schedules), and modify three
> other criteria (record vs Teams Under Consideration, record in the
> last 16 and record vs common opponents) to account for strength of
> schedule, as judged by the KRACH ratings of the opponents.  The
> tournament brackets, using these modified pairwise comparisons (which
> can be found in their entirety at
> <http://www.slack.net/~whelan/cgi-bin/tbrw.cgi?pairwise$kpwc>)
>
>
>  5W Colgate (E)                     6E MSU-Mankato (W)
>  4W St Cloud (W)                    3E New Hampshire (H)
>       1W Wisconsin (W)    --+--2E St Lawrence (E)
>                             |
>       2W North Dakota (W) --+--1E Maine (H)
>  3W Boston Univ (H)                 4E Boston Coll (H)
>  6W Mich State (C)                  5E Michigan (C)
>
> This is a result of giving SLU the automatic bye for winning the ECAC
> regular season and tournament championship (UNH would get it based on
> the comparisons), but otherwise seeding everything according to the
> numbers.  If the NCAA made a point of avoiding intraconference games,
> the brackets would look like:
>
>  5W Mich State (C)                  6E MSU-Mankato (W)
>  4W Boston Univ (H)                 3E New Hampshire (H)
>       1W Wisconsin (W)    --+--2E St Lawrence (E)
>                             |
>       2W North Dakota (W) --+--1E Maine (H)
>  3W Boston Coll (H)                 4E St Cloud (W)
>  6W Michigan (C)                    5E Colgate (E)
>
> Either way, Michigan and Michigan State are seeded even lower than in
> the current system, but Niagara and Quinnipiac have been excluded
> purely on the basis of the modified criteria.  So here is a
> redefinition which addresses Mason's concerns: it accounts for
> strength of schedule (and thereby also the strength of everyone's
> conference schedule), and it does not rank Niagara or Quinnipiac above
> Michigan or Michigan State.  All it fails to do is give the CCHA teams
> better seeds.
>
> > Mason concurs. By way of suggestion, the Spartan head coach
> says that
> > perhaps the NCAA should look at individual league win percentages in
> > NCAA postseason play, but in fact, the numbers he seeks for league
> > strength vindication are inconclusive.
>
> I've deleted the rest of the article, which goes on to compare these
> numbers, because this is such a ludicrous suggestion.  First of all,
> with an almost complete turnover every four years in college sports,
> what do NCAA tournament results from six or eight years ago have to do
> with the strength of any team in any conference in the NCAA today?
> Second, the makeup of the conferences themselves isn't even the same
> as it was in the past, so why should for example Northern Michigan be
> judged on the basis of what Minnesota did in the early '90s.  Third,
> since the tournament went to the single elimination format in 1992,
> there have been eleven games in each year's NCAA tournament.  That's
> 88 games in the past eight years.  Why should those 88 games be
> considered more useful for judging the strength of the various
> conferences than the 931 games played between tournament-eligible
> programs this year?  (If we restrict attention to games involving only
> members of established conferences, the number is 744, and even only
> looking at interconference games between major conferences, there were
> 144 played this season.)  Finally, given that a higher-seeded team
> will typically have some advantage in a tournament game (last line
> change, playing closer to home, or even a bye in the previous round),
> correlating future seeding with past results could potentially become
> a self-fulfilling prophesy.  Teams would be seeded poorly because of
> their league's past performance, have a disadvantage in the tournament
> because of their low seeds, and therefore be more likely to continue
> to perform poorly.
>
> I'm very disappointed to see the ill-informed and self-serving
> bellyaching contained in the USCHO article coming from a serious
> journalist and two Division I head hockey coaches.  Typically, this is
> the domain of the ignorant fan (for example, those who have
> complained, utterly without justification, that the ECAC should have
> had a third team in either of the past two tournaments).  On the
> bright side, we can hope that this draws more attention to the flaws
> in the NCAA's current selection criteria and the inadequacy of the
> current fix of subjectively overruling some of the comparisons on the
> basis of actual or perceived conference strength.
>
>                                           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?tourney
>
 
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