Greg R. Berge wrote:
 
> However, I do agree with the poster that teams with records under .500
> which win auto bids should be included in the TUC pool when evaluating
> other team's NCAA bid selections.  I am not sure if this has ever happened,
> but still it seems reasonable to me to effectively ignore the RS records of
> these teams, in the same sense that said records are ignored by there being
> auto-bids for conference tourny titles at all.
 
I disagree with this emphatically.  New Hampshire's seeding in the NCAA tourney
is significantly helped if Merrimack wins the Hockey East title.  Getting to
add their 3-0 record vs. the Warriors flips the PWC the currently lose to
Wisconsin and drops the one that they lose with Ohio State into the RPI
tiebreaker, which OSU still wins, but by a very narrow margin.
 
If the point of measuring the record of each team against tournament caliber
opposition to to accurately guage their perfomance why should UNH benefit
because Merrimack has learned how to win now that it's March?  They last played
the Warriors before Thanksgiving.
 
Record vs. TUC is already biased by uneven caliber of opponents within this
category (check out the Michigan-Yale comparison for a good example of this).
What it does not need is to add in teams with sub-.500 records.
 
J. Michael Neal
 
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