I believe each league has the choice on how to award the autobid.  
However, all the hockey conferences opt to have the money making(?)  
end of the season conference tournament. I think a conference can  
decide to forego the conference tourney and give the bid to the RS  
wiinner.

In basketball, the Ivy League is the only one to award the autobid to  
the regular season conference champion. However, there are rumblings  
that the powers that be in IVY athletics are considering a squeakball  
tourney (http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2007/writers/seth_davis/ 
02/22/hoop.thoughts/index.html). Egads!

Rita-Ann Monde
Trinity College 1991
Cornell University 2000



On Mar 18, 2007, at 1:57 PM, Dr. Bob Hamilton wrote:

> Seem to me that the champion of a season of league play and  
> selecting teams
> for a best tournament.that can be fielded are quite different.  A  
> season of
> play based a conference method for game scheduling is quite  
> different, it
> seems to me, from finding the teams at the end of the season that  
> would make
> the best possible tournament for Division 1 college hockey fans.   
> Seems that
> is what would be more important in a post-season tournament selection
> process than making it totally on play that happened throughout the  
> season
> with no consideration of current events.  That this is far from  
> nonsense
> except in a viewpoint that does not want to recognize these current  
> events.
> It is still mostly about the results of games but does not ignore the
> reality of recent significant changes in circumstances.  The  
> autobid coming
> from the league tournament gives consideration to current  
> performance since
> a hot team can win the tournament and be an autobid.  Maybe that is  
> the only
> "adjustment" that is needed but it does allow for something other  
> than games
> played throughout the season to determine the result.  Seems by the  
> logic
> presented, that it is nonsense.to give the NCAA bid to the  
> tournament champ
> instead of the league champ.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: John T Whelan <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Sunday, March 18, 2007 1:21 PM
> Subject: Re: Starting the Bitching Early
>
>
>> On Sun, 18 Mar 2007, Dr. Bob Hamilton wrote:
>>
>>> Seems they are still missing something.  Let's take an extreme  
>>> case where
> a
>>> major player is injured and cannot play in the tournaments.  And  
>>> to make
> it
>>> even more interesting, what if the injury happens in the last  
>>> game of the
>>> season where the team loses the tournament championship and yet  
>>> qualifies
> on
>>> the current PWR.  Or what if they win and a post-game brouhaha  
>>> leads to
>>> significant DQ's, it seems they would still be in the regionals.   
>>> These
> are,
>>> of course, extreme examples but it does get at the importance of  
>>> looking
> at
>>> recent performance.
>>
>> That's exactly the sort of nonsense that's considered in the seeding
>> of the basketball tournament.  Tournament seeding should reflect the
>> position each team has earned through the results of their games, not
>> some expected level of performance in the tournament.  Are the
>> standings of an individual league adjusted at the end of the season
>> based on player injuries etc?
>>
>> The NCAA never did that for hockey, although they did once have a
>> criterion that paid more attention to recent games.  But still only
>> game results.
>>
>>> Seems this is different from strength of schedule.
>>
>> It's completely different.  The point is that what the NCAA used  
>> to do
>> was just look at each team's winning percentage in their last 16  
>> or 20
>> games.  But two teams may have played very different schedules in
>> those games, and going 13-2-1 in Atlantic Hockey is not necessarily a
>> better performance than going 11-4-1 in the WCHA.  (This is also true
>> in the "vs TUC" criterion, as was just pointed out, but at least
>> there's some selection of team strengths.)
>>
>> Now, we did once propose a system to adjust for this in the various
>> criteria:
>>
>> http://slack.net/~whelan/tbrw/tbrw.cgi?kpairwise
>>
>> John Whelan
>> Cornell '91