I write:
>> Apparently the committee had no doubt
>> about Niagara and considered them amn Estern team, but the 6 seed
>> implies there was something other than PWCs at work:
John Edwards replies:
> This shouldn't surprise us. For the last few years we have known, almost
> before the Committee does, who the 12 teams are. This is because the PWC
> system (and RPI before) made things essentially automatic. Quinnipiac and
> Niagara have lessened the automatic nature of it, but for the most part we
> knew who was in and who was out. The last real controversy I remember was
> Colorado College's exclusion after they won the McNaughton Cup (and then
> choked against Michigan Tech).
> However, the PWCs have never been a true predictor of where the 12 teams
> actually go once they are picked. There have always been other factors
> worked into the mix. Attendance, keeping host teams at home, the Clarkson
> rule (am I the only who finds it amusing that St. Lawrence takes advantage
> of the Clarkson rule this year?) and avoiding intraconference matchups are
> all still part of the process.
Yes and no. (Almost) anything goes when deciding which teams end up
in which regional. However, seeding within the regional has always
been determined by the PWCs, with adjustments to avoid intraconference
matchups. Seeding by the PWCs would have given brackets of
Wisconsin-Niagara-BC and NoDak-UNH-MSU, with no potential
intraconference games. Since the PWCs were not overridden for
conference and presumably not for attendance reasons, the committee
must have decided that Niagara's PWC wins were misleading when seeding
them 6th rather than 4th.
Other asides: There was some question as to who would receive at-large
bids last year, as it depended on how the committee defined the
bubble. SLU would have gotten the second East bye even without the
Clarkson rule, since they win comparisons with all the Eastern teams
except Maine.
> That's why, most years, the predictions of who is actually in the
> tournament are accurate but the predictions of who goes where are usually
> inaccurate. In this case, I think the Committee realized that while Niagara
> is in the top 12, they probably aren't as good as their PWC ranking would
> indicate. Thus, the initial ranking of Niagara as the 7th Eastern team.
Incidentally, note that the regional distribution of the past two
years seems to indicate that the committee has dropped the silly
practice of considering the 7th-ranked team from an overrepresented
region to belong to the other region, and then swapping them back for
the regionals. Instead, they have once again swapped the three
lowest-ranked teams from the larger region for the two bottom
representatives of the smaller one. A welcome change, although I wish
they had told us about it in advance.
> While I'm on the subject of Niagara, I have a feeling that Iona did Niagara
> a favour by knocking off Quinnipiac. As I recall the arguments in favour of
> a Quinnipiac berth last year, they were predicated on Quinnipiac pulling
> the double. Again, this year, I think arguments in favour of Quinnipiac and
> Niagara were predicated on that assumption. Thus, Iona's defeat of
> Quinnipiac essentially ended whatever NCAA hopes they had. I wonder if the
> Committee would have had a harder time picking Niagara and excluding
> Quinnipiac, had Quinnipiac won the MAAC tournament. If that is the case,
> then I could have easily seen them excluding both teams, and (in the end)
> choosing Mankato instead.
You're forgetting that those arguments were complete bollocks. The
outcome of the MAAC tournament was only significant for NCAA selection
in the minds of those doing the arguing.
John Whelan, Cornell '91
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http://www.amurgsval.org/joe/
Play along at home at http://www.slack.net/~whelan/cgi-bin/tbrw.cgi?tourney
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