This leads us to David's question from yesterday:

> If you were the commissioner, and wanted to make your league "the best",
> what could you -- as the commissioner, or as the league do?

The commissioner could coordinate his/her league's schedule to facilitate
scheduling non-conference games.  That's a tough task, because getting the
teams in a conference to agree on a schedule is like herding cats.  But that's
how a commissioner could help a league improve.

I don't think any feasible solution will involve reducing the number of league
games, for all the obvious reasons.

-- Erik

Rita-Ann Monde wrote:
> given that the ivies, wcha and now hockey east only have ~ 7 nc games,
> maybe the commissioners can get together to faciliate some interleague
> match-ups. maybe on a rotating basis have a wcha-ecac and hea-ccha
> challenge one year, and then the next be ccha-ecac, hea-wcha and rotate
> it through. Match-ups and who travels could be done by drawing out of a
> hat or based on end of the season records (thus match-ups wouldn't be
> announce to until the preceding spring enabling the presumed top teams
> in each league to play vs each other).  i realize that comparisons at
> the end of the season would be a bit skewed in that the majority of
> your nonconference comparisons would be to one league. Also the number
> of teams in each league isn't the same, but maybe some of the better
> aha/cha teams could be invited to round out the numbers. Because of the
> logistics involved, the conference commissioners  need to decide if a
> more interconference match-ups are needed and/or desired, and if so,
> set aside a dedicated weekend for two such "challenge games" to be
> scheduled and played.
>
> I just think that with the limited number of NC games, each team has
> its favorite "NC-opponents" that they like to schedule for various
> reasons and many teams have tournament commitments that take up 2
> games. thus to attempt to give everyone a chance to have a good NC
> schedule and to "play somebody", it needs to be a joint effort by all
> the conferences.