John,

    You are too smart for your own good (and for the rest of us.  We've all
been trained to see exactly the scenario you layed out 'fixing' the seeding.
I was expecting/hoping for it).  It failed to materialize.  Oh well.

Larry


----- Original Message -----
From: "John T. Whelan" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, March 23, 2003 8:53 PM
Subject: Re: Tournament Brackets - First Thoughts


> On Sun, 23 Mar 2003, Patrick Abegg wrote:
>
> > Why does Maine go west, rather than BC? This is the key question I have
> > based on the analysis that I think we've all done.
>
> The only reasonoble explanation I can see is to put Cornell in the
> bracket with #8 BC instead of #6 Maine or #5 BU.  This is presumably
> also why Cornell was sent to Providence even though Worcester was
> closer.  Looking at the brackets, it seems to me that every other
> decision they had to make was designed to make the Northeast bracket
> easier and make up for the imbalance of putting a WCHA team in with
> Cornell.
>
> > On the TV broadcast, the "expert" has no idea why this bracketing is
done,
> > after saying "it's all done by the numbers." He's hinting that it's
Maine
> > choke at the end - which is explicitly not a criterion to be used. The
only
> > criterion that could work is the attendance issue (BC is closer to
> > Providence than Maine).
>
> The expert was longtime HOCKEY-Ler and USCHO columnist Adam Wodon.
> Trust me, he has a pretty good idea how it's done, there was only just
> so much he could say in 2 minutes.
>
> > Actually, their expert is hinting that the whole system is messed up.
(He
> > used the code phrase "a few adjustments are necessary.")
>
> The point was that because of the MAAC and CHA autobids and the loss
> of the byes, there's suddenly a huge difference between the #15/#16
> teams in the tournamant and the #13/#14.  So having a combination of
> inflexible bands and an inflexible policy about not pairing certain
> teams that are stuck in those bands can lead to some pretty unfair
> overall seeding.  I think Adam's point was that the whole reason to
> have a committee is to make judgement calls like this to tinker with
> the seedings.
>
> The really unfortunate thing is that the committee missed their way
> out of this situation.  St. Cloud is #13 in the PWR after bonus points
> have been added to the RPI, but if the committee had just confined
> attention to comparisons among tournament teams the ranking would have
> been #11 Harvard, #12 SCSU, #13 Ohio State, with one WCHA team as a
> 4-seed, and they could have bracketed the tournament reasonably.
> Apparently they have forgotten all about the individual comparisons
> used by previous committees and really do just rank the teams 1-16
> according to the overall PWR.  It sounds like this subtlety didn't
> even occur to them, which is pretty frustrating, since it means people
> like me and Adam and Jayson Moy have thought more about the seeding
> than the committee in charge of it.
>                                           John Whelan, Cornell '91
>                                                  [log in to unmask]
>                                      http://www.amurgsval.org/joe/
>
> Enjoy the latest Hockey Geek tools at slack.net/hockey
>