Greg B responds to me:
 
>The best bet for the ECAC is probably for Yale to tank their final matchups
>against league contenders and just eek out the RS title; have the league #2
>finish strongly and wind up beating Yale in the Consy (question: umm... is
>there a consy at Placid this year?); have the league #3 finish strongly and
>lose the final; and then have a darkhorse, but still a TUC, win the whole
>enchilada and snag the other auto-bid.
 
        Nitpick: any team that wins a conference tournament is
automatically a TUC for all purposes, regardless of their winning
percentage.
 
>that's a Plaid three-peat)
[...]
> a record 10th ECAC conference championship
>flag flying from the Lynah rafters next year).
 
        Which tartan would they use on this one? :-)
 
>> comparisons among the remaining ECAC teams.  Remember that the
>> committee no longer just uses the total PWR; they look at individual
>> comparisons among teams competing for a slot, seed or whatever.
 
>Um... really???  Let's say Yale sweeps the RS/PS and Clarkson and Cornell
>wind up, I dunno, 14th and 16th in PWR.  But say further that Cornell swept
>Clarkson in the RS and even , for sake of argument, beat em in the Placid
>SF to go 3-0.  Clarkson winds up with more total pair wins, Cornell winds
>up with a dominant head-to-head pair win.  They'd actually take Cornell as
>the #2 ECAC?  That seems to defeat much of the purpose of the PWR for me.
>After all, the cusp is where the heavy pissing and ranting happens -- it is
>where the NCAA should most rely on the determinism of the PWR.  Just my
>20,000 lire...
 
        I'll bet you dollars to donuts (or zeppoli to lire) this is
one of those circumstances the committee hasn't planned for.  I'm just
going by the general pattern (remember Cornell and Miami last year).
I'll grant you that my guess is a little inconsistent; if comparisons
within a conference are used to pick out the second bid from that
conference in the event that not considering the conference explicitly
would result in its only getting one bid, then the committee should
really fill the two bids for each conference before assigning the
remaining four at-large bids.  In practice, it's not likely to matter.
 
        As for determinism, I'd say comparisons within a conference
are *more* deterministic, since with fewer teams involved, the PWCs
are more likely to be transitive.
 
        Are we having fun yet?  The discussion of ECAC tiebreakers
hasn't even begun!
                                         John Whelan, Cornell '91
                                     Official Scorer/PA Announcer
                                        U of Utah Ice Hockey Club
                                               <[log in to unmask]>
                      <http://www.cc.utah.edu/~jtw16960/joe.html>
 
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