At 8:33 PM -0500 7/31/96, Sean Pickett wrote:
> On Info-Hockey-L Deron Treadwell wrote:
> > "We want closure," Tyler said, "but we also want what is fair to our
> > students."
> >
> > Both Tyler and Hutchinson cited their concern for the players who
> > during the last three years have missed two post-season tournaments
> > already and that it was these players complete cooperation that made
> > this investigation complete and successful.
>
> I wish to point out that the NCAA itself did not force the Maine
> hockey teams to miss the NCAA tournament "two of the past three
> years."
 
That's true, but they didn't say that in the release.
 
The point Maine is trying to make is that an additional year of no NCAA
tourney competition is unfair to the current players, most of whom have
already missed NCAA competition due to transgressions that they were not
responsible for.
 
> In 1993-94 Maine's failure to make the NCAA Torunament was due to the
> team having an actual won-loss record of 17-15-4, including a season
> ending pair of losses to BU in the Hockey East quarterfinals.
> According to Shawn Walsh at the time, it was that record which the
> Ice Hockey Selection Committee used to select the 12 teams to the
> 1994 NCAA Tournament.
 
But Maine only played BU in the 1994 HE quarterfinals because of the
forfeits which dropped them to 8th place.  If there were no forfeits, Maine
would have finished second or third - second, if I remember correctly.
They would have probably swept the quarterfinal series to give them a
record of 19-13-4.  Depending on their showing in the next two games, they
could have either gained an automatic bid by winning HE outright or
qualified at-large.  It would have been close; it was already close as it
was when the actual results were considered.
 
Maine doesn't actually say that the NCAA caused the team to miss the NCAA
tourney two of the last three years.  However, it is definitely true that
the prior transgressions caused them to miss 1995-96, and it is possible
that the team would have made the tourney in 1993-94 if the ineligibilities
that year had not occurred.
 
Either way, nothing that happened either in 1993-94 or 1995-96 can be
blamed on the current players, except perhaps for Jeff Tory, if you believe
that he himself should have known he was ineligible.  But even that is not
necessarily true.  And even if you do believe Tory should have known he was
ineligible, it is still the case that all but one of the current players
are suffering for something that was not their fault.
 
> This past year the University, not the NCAA, choose to not allow the
> team to play in the NCAA Tournament as a self-imposed penalty.  The
> NCAA likely took the self-imposed penalty into consideration, but
> based on the additional scholarships the NCAA has taken away, banning
> the team from next year's NCAA Tournament is as severe as implied.
 
I do think it is quite likely that Maine's self-imposed penalty was
considered and resulted in only one year of being banned from postseason
competition instead of two.  But this doesn't change the fact that players
who were not involved in past violations are bearing some of the punishment.
 
I've generally been against decisions in the past that have punished people
who were not responsible, and I tend to feel the same way here.  On the
other hand, it is also true that there are not many things the NCAA can do
to punish a school, but this is one of them and it does hurt those innocent
players.
 
I believe that the NCAA views this as a punishment of the school and not
the players, and their argument would be that the players should hold the
school responsible and not the NCAA.  After all, if the school didn't
commit those violations, the players could still play; the NCAA didn't
commit the violations.    You could go on to say that a player's
eligibility for NCAA competition depends on two things: the eligibility of
the institution, and the eligibility of the player.  Here, the players did
their part, but the school did not.
 
Yet, one could make a case for this as an example of the punishment not
fitting the crime, in that people who didn't commit the violations are
being punished.  There is no easy answer, because it is difficult to punish
the school without also affecting those players who were innocent.  Even
the reduction in scholarships affects the players, because they will be
forced to play on a team that cannot offer the same number of scholarships
as their opponents and may not be as good as they would have been otherwise.
 
---                                                                   ---
Mike Machnik                   [log in to unmask]            *HMM* 11/13/93
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