At 10:28 PM 3/5/96, D B Doucette wrote:
>Kevin Power replied (spelling his):
>>Good point.  Compared to other collegiate sports (basketball and football),
>>hockey is alredy overloading.  Hockey sends 12 of 44 or 27.3% of all
>>elidgable teams to the national tournement.  Basketball sends 64 of 309
>>or 20.7% to the national tournement.  Finally, football has approximately
>>15 or 16 Bowl games which means 30 of 168 teams or 17.6% (I may be a
>>bit light on this one) go to the post season.
>>
>>The point being that hockey sends over a quarter of it's teams to the BIG
>>one.  It's just a function of the low number of participating schools.
>>See expansion thread a month back.
 
A note here: DivI hockey cannot expand its tourney to 16 teams because of
an NCAA rule limiting the size of tourneys.  The number of teams in a
tourney cannot be greater than a certain percentage of all teams in that
division.  DivI hockey is over that percentage as it is, I believe, and
should have less than 12 teams but was grandfathered when the rule was
enacted.  I cannot recall exactly what the percentage is...I think it is in
the low 20's.
 
>Here's two thoughts:  Make it truly a "National" championship.  Make it a
>16-team tournament, and put the top 4 Division III teams into the mix.
 
This would require a drastic change in NCAA rules.  To be eligible to play
up for an NCAA title (which many DivII and III schools like RPI and LSSU
are doing), you must declare your intention prior to the season.  This is
an NCAA-wide rule.  Here, this would not be possible since the four teams
that would compete from DivIII would not be known until late in the season.
They would have already declared for DivIII.
 
>The 12th seed in hockey is more competitive vs. the top teams than the
>bottom in hoops.
 
I wonder how much of this is because of all of the automatic bids in hoop
that go to conferences that are DivI but are not of the caliber of the ACC,
Big East, etc.  If the true top 64 teams were taken, then chances are that
those 16 and even 15 seeds would not get bids.  But this is another topic.
 
An analogy to hockey might be if the Independents like Army, UConn, Holy
Cross, Canisius, etc. were to get together and form a new DivI conference
as has been occasionally mentioned.  At first, that conference would
probably not be of the same caliber as the current four conferences, but it
may well qualify for an automatic bid since it would contain all DivI
teams.
 
>Hockey at Div. I level is more competitive top-to-bottom
>than any of the  Div. 1 teams in hoops or even the 1AA (CFA) teams in
>pigskin.
 
I think this is mainly because hoop and football are more lucrative sports.
The fact that many schools were pushing their hoop and football teams up
to DivI to get a piece of the pie (read: $$$) led the NCAA to tighten
restrictions on schools playing sports outside their division.  But it was
not an issue in hockey since hockey is not the money-maker that hoop and
football are - although hockey is still one of the top grossing sports in
the NCAA.
 
---                                                                   ---
Mike Machnik                   [log in to unmask]            *HMM* 11/13/93
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