On Wed, 8 Nov 2000, Susan Shepherd wrote:

> I had presumed that the established conferences were not willing to schedule
> the MAAC schools because it was a no-win situation for them. And that it has
> been hard for MAAC schools to get games with the big boys, not the other way
> around. Anyone with more info on this?

It's been far from a no-win situation to schedule a MAAC team, due to
the deficiencies in the Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) and the other
tournament selection criteria.  Assuming that a team could pretty
comfortably count on a win over a MAAC opponent, that win would boost
a team's winning percentage without adversely affecting their strength
of schecule according to RPI.  And if that MAAC opponent won more than
50% of their games (mostly in the conference) they would count as a
team under consideration.  The main reason Rensselaer was as close to
an at-large NCAA bid as they were last year was because they beat
Quinnipiac in a non-conference game.  Now of course the danger, as
Cornell has illustrated, is that one will actually lose that game; but
even considering that, the risk is presumably less than that of losing
to a team from another conference with a comparable winning
percentage.

I think most of us would be more supportive of the newcomers from the
MAAC if some of that league's partisans hadn't been subjecting us to
campaigns for an undeserved at-large bid, pride in being awarded an
automatic bid for nothing more than not folding after two seasons, and
ECAC-bashing.
                                          John Whelan, Cornell '91
                                                 [log in to unmask]
                                     http://www.amurgsval.org/joe/

Consider the alternative: http://slack.net/~whelan/cgi-bin/tbrw.cgi?kpairwise