Arthur Mintz replies to Bill Fenwick:
>>Aack!  Bleah!  Phooey!  *retch*  So RPI and Union will meet in the first
>>round of the RPI Invitational (as usual) and it will count as an ECAC
>>game?!?  I see a couple of problems with this setup:
>>
>Whatever your personal opinion may be of this situation, Bill, it's
>been an allowable option in the ECAC for years. I don't have the
>exact wording of the ruling that allows teams to schedule first-round
>tournament games as league games, and I'm not going to go back and
>research ECAC schedules for the past few years trying to find other
>games that have been scheduled like this, but I do know that it's
>perfectly legal and has been for years. I don't know how they handle
>the overtime discrepancy, however.
 
I have researched this and teams in the ECAC North/South/East/West have
done this for years. In fact, I think if you meet a league opponent in
the second game of a tourney, you also count that as a league game.
They use winning percentage to determine their standings, so all these
extra games don't screw much up (especially because nobody plays the same
schedule to begin with in those leagues).
 
In the past 5 years, though, no team in the ECAC Division I has done this.
 
Keith