"John T. Whelan" <[log in to unmask]> writes:
>
> Mike Machnik says:
>
> >For example, Joe Bertagna has said that he would like to expand HE to 12
> >teams and have a 22 game league schedule, playing each opponent twice and
> >allowing 12 or more NC games.
>
>         Gee, wonder where he got that idea? :-)
 
Right -- Joe has said he likes the ECAC setup and that it is a big reason
why he is in favor of doing it in HE as well.
 
> Seriously, though, the
> ECAC works fine as a 12-team league for two big reasons: 1) Geography
> allows for six natural travel partnerships and an elegant pattern of
> weekend series, 2) 22 league games is plenty given the Ivy League's
> limit of 29 and the ECAC's limit of 32 overall games.  The schedule is
> perfectly balanced, and each team gets to host each other team once
> during the season, which to me makes each occasion special.
 
This comes back to the point I made about different things being right for
different leagues.  HE is in a different situation from the other leagues
because 8 of the 9 teams are within a 90 minute drive of each other.  So
most of the schedule involves teams playing an opponent twice on a weekend,
either home and away or both at one site in the case of Maine and sometimes
UMass.  People can also easily go on the road to see virtually any of their
team's league games.  I think this helps build rivalries in the league.  It
always has going back to the days when HE teams played each other 4x in a
season.
 
I can see the weekend sets continuing even if Joe's plan was to be
implemented.  One of the bad things about that is once you see a team, you
are done with them for the year.  It's interesting to see how teams change
over a season and how a matchup that went one way early on may have
reversed by the time the teams meet later in the season.
 
That's another reason why (again) if it were up to me, I'd like to play
everybody 4x...one weekend in the first half and one in the second half.
But this won't happen if you have more than 8 teams.
 
Still the big problem I see right now is that with an odd number of teams,
someone is going to be off every weekend down the stretch unless you work
in some very creative scheduling.  So I'd like to see the league pick up
one more school to balance this out.  But you don't just admit anyone, you
have to make sure it's the right school.  As has been noted before, Niagara
would probably be in HE already if it was not so far away.  Or if RPI had
decided it wanted to make the move, or say Vermont, or if UConn was to
decide it wanted to compete at that level.  Oddly enough with all the
expansion talk and schools moving up, here you have a league actively
looking to add another member for a number of good reasons, but the schools
that HE would be interested in are not interested, and no one else is a
good fit.
 
BTW...going back to the number of teams...once the MAAC schools complete
their transition, we will have something like 18 D1 programs within about a
two hour radius of Boston.  (8 HE, 3 ECAC, 7 MAAC)  That might be pushing
it since the southern Connecticut schools may be a little more than two
hours, but not much more.
 
---                                                                   ---
Mike Machnik                [log in to unmask]               *HMM* 11/13/93
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