Jon writes:
  Frankly, I've heard the "ECAC is weak" argument ever since HE split off
  7 years ago.  So I pulled out my records and found the following:
 
  # Championships:	ECAC	2
			HE	0
			CCHA	2
			WCHA	3
 
  # Teams in Final	ECAC	5
			HE	2
			CCHA	3
			WCHA	4
 
  Does this mean anything for this year's teams? - No.  But I will bet that
  if we went back over the years, we would find that many of the
  techniques (polls, computer models, etc.) which penalize Clarkson
  because they only beat Dartmouth instead of beating the crap out of them
  would not have predicted such strong results for the ECAC.  Sure there
  are some weak teams in the league, but the ECAC's best have shown over
  the years they can play with anyone.
 
The polls had very high regard for RPI and Harvard the years that they
won the title, so in no way is anyone saying that the best in the ECAC
can not be competitive. But looking at numbers of championships won is
not really useful in comparing conference strength. Why not final four
appearances? I'd think that would indicate the greater depth of talent
in each conference a bit better (e.g., I know that at least 3 times in
your sample space Hockey East has sent 2 teams to the final four in the
same year). When the ECAC has had a dominant team in the past few years,
that team has often had a season with a very, very, small number of losses
due to the lack of overall schedule strength. This is not the case for
dominant teams in other conferences.
 
Overall, I won't have a particular problem with the two entries from each
conference most years, as it still leaves the selection committee with
some flexibility in rewarding stronger conferences with more bids
(e.g., Hockey East's 4 last year while every other conference still got
at least two bids) but perhaps the solution would be to expand to 16
teams, thereby assuring that no worthy teams will be left out due
to automatic bid requirements (much the same reason the basketball tourney
now has 64 teams...conference strength disparity + many automatic bids =
tournament expansion).
 
Mark Daly
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