I think Charlie's analysis points to why the committees' MAAC Escape
Clause will be used to exclude Quinnipiac this season.  Some aspects
of it are specific to the MAAC's inbred schedule (lack of head-to-head
games, and common opponets, which used to be worse before this
weekend, when Q's only non-conference game was a win over Army and
thus *no*one* from a major conference could do better than tie them on
common opponents), but some of it is food for thought about how the
committee might modify the selection criteria to make them more fair.
 
Craig Powers has commented on his unofficial NU Hockey Page
<http://lynx.dac.neu.edu/c/cpowers/nuhockey/> that the use of straight
winning percentage in the "last 16" criteria unfairly benefitted teams
with weak schedules.  The Q case is an extreme version of this; maybe
the committee should look into building strength of schedule into this
criterion as well.
 
Also, someone commented on the Cornell Hockey Chat last night that
pairwise comparisons can be greatly effected by whether borderline
teams end up above or below .500, swinging the records vs TUC of
higher-ranked teams.  As we see, Q gets credit for games vs TUC which
are only against such borderline teams.  Perhaps some sort of
weighting of the TUC record by RPI or winning percentage of the
opponents would avoid both misleading TUC records and discontinuous
changes.
                                          John Whelan, Cornell '91
                                                  [log in to unmask]
                                     http://www.amurgsval.org/joe/
 
"We've got a whole mess of penalties"  -- Cornell PA Announcer
   Arthur Mintz, after the Cornell-Union brawl 1998 December 4
 
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