Nathan Hampton writes:
 
>The only good basic plan would be to combine the ECAC and new MAAC and
>give them one, maybe two entrants (given the ECAC's 0-6 record over two
>years, 0-3 this year, etc., etc., etc.
 
        First of all, get your facts straight.  The ECAC went 1-3 last
year, so that makes them 1-6 over the last two, not 0-6.  And the year
before that they were 2-3, including an overtime loss on a
questionable goal in the national semifinal.
 
        Second, with a 16-team tourney, the issue of the four
established conferences getting two bids each is even less of an
issue.  How often has the ECAC failed to have two teams in the top
fifteen?  RPI in 1995 is the only example I can think of, and their
ticket to the tourney was an automatic bid for winning the ECACs, just
like anyone else in the other three conferences could get.  This year
Princeton made the NCAAs as the ECAC champion, but they would have
made the field based on their final pairwise numbers anyway.  The last
ECAC team to make the NCAAs thanks purely to an auto bid was Cornell
in 1996; they were the #12 team, but they needed the auto bid because
an even lower ranked Providence team won the Hockey East tournament.
How about the automatic bye rule which could unfairly displace a
Hockey East team if the same team won the ECAC RS and tournament
championships?  Well, the only team ever to benefit from it was BU
last year, and it allowed them to take a bye away from Vermont;
otherwise two ECAC teams would have gotten byes that year based on the
pairwise.
 
        I'll grant you that the ECAC's performance in recent national
tournaments has been anemic, but a lot of that can be attributed to
the fact that our most frequent standard-bearer is a classic
underacheiver come playoff time.  (Both ECAC and NCAA.)  Let's not
start making insulting suggestions about taking away ECAC bids; the
ECAC hasn't put a sub-top-twelve squad into the NCAAs since 1995.
 
> Better yet, let every team in the nation into a pre-regional
>tournament and make all of them play into the regional.
 
        That's more or less what the conference playoffs are.
Everyone has a shot at an automatic bid, except three CCHA, two ECAC
and one HE team.  Which is the conference that insists on letting
*all* its teams into the playoffs?  Hmmm...
 
                                         John Whelan, Cornell '91
                                               <[log in to unmask]>
                      <http://www.cc.utah.edu/~jtw16960/joe.html>
 
        Learn about the NCAA selection process on the web at
       http://www.slack.net/~whelan/cgi-bin/tbrw.cgi?pairwise
 
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