Dear Bob,
 
All your index proposal really constitutes is whining that somehow your favorite team is losing on the ice and you want to adjust how that should be determined or that you are frustrated because your school is having trouble recruiting the hockey players you want.  Fortunately or unfortunately D-1 athletics is about winning within the rules with the best players you can put on the ice.  And, it is perfectly reasonable for a kid to try to improve himself by playing juniors.  If your 17 year old premed student doesn't want to play juniors but is good enough to play D-1, he will.  Remember the Ivy League teams which can't give athletic scholarships are more than happy to recruit bright premed students who can play hockey (as I suspect are many of the other excellent schools playing D-1 hockey).  If the 17 year old is not good enough for D-1, D-3 hockey is a great alternative that provides a great hockey experiemce and allows him all that extra time for his labs so he can get into med school.
 
By the way, the Jock U I graduated from with undergraduate and graduate degrees is the University of Chicago.  Few would accuse it of being Jock U although as a D-3 school it has its athletic priorities in the right place.  They did teach us how to analyze specious arguments there, however.
 
HOCKEY-L is for discussion of college ice hockey;  send information to
[log in to unmask], The College Hockey Information List.