Well, Mark Lewin beat me to the punch; that'll teach me to write my
emails offline. :-) Here are my comments on the Fanter interview:
So, during one of the intermissions of the Cornell-Union game, I
switched over to WRPI and caught the tail end of an interview with
Jeff Fanter. When I tuned in, he was talking about the ECAC F*n*l
F*v*, saying that the issue was not so much whether there were four or
five teams in Placid but whether there were eight or ten teams in the
playoffs, since the ECAC would never go back to the Tuesday night
preliminary games. He said that the league was too deep to exclude
the #9 and #10 teams from the playoffs. (I guess he's too young to
remember when there were 8 teams out of 17 in the ECAC playoffs.) I
think a little healthy competition among borderline teams for the
eigth place spot would be fine; would it have been unfair to exclude
Vermont and SLU last season? Unfortunately, the ratchet effect will
probably keep us at 10 teams for a while.
He also gave the usual spiel about letting one more team in on the
Lake Placid experience, and talked about all the side attractions
they're adding to the ECACs to give more to the fans, since this
league likes to distinguish itself as fan-friendly, yadda yadda yadda.
As I see it, the F*n*l F*v* is a lot worse for the fans, since they
have to go to Placid a day earlier to see the whole tournament,
probably taking an extra day off from work (Friday-Saturday-Sunday
would be a different story). Plus, and this is the big one, fans of
2/5 of the teams in the tournament have an even chance of seeing their
team play only once, and then having to decide whether to watch the
other four duke it out or just go home.
On the topic of the upcoming ECAC/Hockey East doubleheader, Fanter did
his best to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear: Hartford is a new
market, Yale and Princeton are nearby, etc. Pretty much the only
thing he could say there.
Fanter also talked about radio broadcasts on the internet. He said
they're already up there now (he said "all", but really it's more like
half the teams), but the ECAC wants to provide direct links from its
homepage to the broadcasts. This is a very good idea; Eric Carlson
already has a page with such links for all the Division I games and I
was thinking of adding such a section to my weekly ECAC report. For
Cornell, Brown, Union, RPI and Clarkson, there's a static link right
to the broadcast, but there might be problems with Harvard, Princeton
and Yale. Harvard is only on Audionet, which now has a different .ram
address for each game, and might also object if one of the conferences
provided a direct link to the feed which people would ordinarily only
reach after a maze of advertising-laden Audionet pages. Princeton has
been using long, unguessable .ram addresses which change every
weekend, presumbly to deter people from linking directly, and Yale is
only broadcasting a couple of games a year, although a little
bookkeeping could determine which those are and then link straight to
WYBC for each of them. Similarly for WRUV's occasional Catamount
broadcasts.
He also mentioned that the ECAC Game of the Week would be on the net,
apparently referring to the Empire/NESN package. Couldn't tell if he
meant video or just audio.
Finally, he was asked about the ECAC's respectable out-of-conference
performance this year. I think there was also mention of the lack of
an ECAC team in the Top Ten, because his answer involved not getting
too excited until the RPI numbers start coming out in a few months.
(Of course, the RPI can be calculated now; it's not like it doesn't
exist until USCHO starts posting it, but it is not terribly meaningful
until more teams have played each other.)
Would anyone who heard more of the interview like to comment further?
John Whelan, Cornell '91
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http://www.amurgsval.org/joe/
Attention ECAC: Eight is Enough--Flush the Final Five!
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