On Jul 26,  6:51, John Whelan wrote:
>According to an article at
>http://www.uscollegehockey.com/news/2000/07/25_finalbids.html the NCAA
>Men's Division I Ice Hockey Committee has, as expected, reduced the
>number of automatic bids to each of the four major conferences to one,
>to be given to the conference's choice of regular season or playoff
>champion.  (The last time this was the case, all four chose the winner
>of the conference tournament.)

This gives me a chance to weigh in belatedly on the who-deserves-the-autobid
discussion.

I'm all for recognizing the efforts of a conference's regular-season champion
with an NCAA bid... *provided* the teams in the conference all play the same
conference schedule.  That's not the case with the WCHA and the CCHA these
days, and a prime example of what can happen with an unbalanced schedule is the
team that started all this grumbling about regular-season champs being left out
in the cold -- Colorado College in 1994.

That year, the Tigers won the WCHA regular-season crown by one point over
Minnesota and two points over Wisconsin.  However, the unbalanced schedule
dictated that each team in the league would play four games against some
conference opponents and two against others.  In CC's case, they played
Minnesota only twice, hosting both games (the first two games of the year for
both teams).  Who's to say what would have happened had the Gophers gotten
another crack at the Tigers at Mariucci... might Minnesota have picked up at
least three points against CC in those two games, thus winning the
regular-season crown themselves?  Maybe, maybe not, but the point is, thanks to
the unbalanced schedule, they never got the chance.  Similarly, what if
Minnesota had played tenth-place Michigan Tech four times during the regular
season (as CC did), rather than twice?  What if Wisconsin had played
ninth-place Denver four times during the regular season (as CC did), rather
than twice?

The possibility of an unbalanced schedule playing a significant role in
determining a regular-season champion is another reason, IMHO, that the
auto-bid should go to the post-season tourney winner.

P.S.  Both the CCHA and WCHA now have schedules in which each team plays some
opponents four times and others two times.  One could get around this
unbalanced schedule by awarding four points per game in situations in which
league opponents meet only twice, rather than the usual two, so the games would
count double.  This has been done in the past -- the CHA did it for some games
involving Air Force last year -- but, does anybody *really* want to see that??
 Yech.

--
Disclaimer -- Unless otherwise noted, all opinions expressed above are
              strictly those of:

Bill Fenwick
Cornell '86 and '95                                             DJF  5/27/94
LET'S GO RED!!                                                  JCF  12/2/97
"Frog's legs?  I can never order them.  I keep wondering, what do they do
 with the rest of the frog?... Oh, they're doing something with them.  You
 never see it on the menu, 'Frog Torso.'"
-- George Carlin