Hi folks-
 
Is it just my imagination, or are the number of polls, constests, computer
ratings, etc. increasing? I find that personally, I am spending too much time
reading yet another poll or rating system. I joined the list 4 (5?) years ago
to hear what is going on in college hockey - game summaries, rankings,
important news about college hockey, etc. The list used to do just that.
Today, however, there just seems to be too much "fluff" and irrelevant
material. I know of several players and coaches who joined the list and then
"unjoined" because of this problem. Do we really need to see messages
containing things like "go <your favorite team>"?
 
I find the computer rating systems interesting because they are presumably
not biased and present an accurate assessment of the relative strengths of
the teams (based on the assumptions of the algorithm - a different topic for
debate). The league standings are also valuable.
 
The polls are getting kind of silly, though. There are very few (any?) of us
who have seen all the teams over a period of weeks and can make any kind of
knowledgeable judgement about where they stand relative to each other.
Perhaps the coaches poll is OK, but getting an arbitrary list of people
together to guess at relative rankings isn't all that meaningful (especially
considering all the biases built in to supporting your home team/league). I
realize that this is fun for the participants and my point of view is going
to be unpopular - it's just the way I feel.
 
With this in mind, I'd like to vote against Steve Twombly's proposal for a
"prediction contest". Again, this may be fun for the participants and is
certainly an appropriate thing to do, but does it really belong on hockey-L?
 
Anyway... Sorry for taking up the bandwidth for this, especially since I am
complainiung about wasted bandwidth. If nobody else feels this way, I will
just keep my peace and dispose of the (myriads of) messages containing YAP.
 
Bob Gross