Mike writes:
>When Coach Morris said, "Not enough emphasis is placed on the regular
 season....
>I believe he was referring to the fact that it is the tournament champion who
>gets the automatic NCAA bid, not the team who played well all season and won
>the regular season.  This issue is of more importance in the ECAC, because the
>ECAC usually gets two NCAA bids.  With the first one gone to the tournament
 
But since the automatic bids for tourney champs began to be awarded, there
has never been a regular season champ who did not make the NCAAs.  In the
poll I conducted, many people commented that they believed an automatic bid
should be awarded to the reg. season champ too; while this does seem to
make sense, I don't think it's a problem now since the reg. season champ
is virtually guaranteed to get in anyway.  The only way I can see this not
happening is if, say, 3 or 4 teams tie for first, and one gets the title by
tiebreaker and then loses in the first round of the tourney.  But in
situations like this, the selection committee *should* be free to choose other
teams, which is why I oppose an automatic bid for the regular season champ.
 
>champ, that leaves one bid left.  If the regular season champ is not the tour-
>nament champ, their can be problems if another team has a better non-league
>record.  It creates more bad feelings when one teams gets in and another one
>has to sit out.  This past season SLU thought that they should have gotten a
>bid when Cornell received it.  SLU was rely on their win over Cornell at the
>tournament, forgetting their poorer non-league record.
 
That's right, and that contradicts what Morris said about the season not
being worth enough.  The bid *did* go to the team that earned it over the long
haul, not the team that pulled the upset in the ECACs.
 
>                                                        I think that going to
>a single elimination quarter-final would be a mistake, allowing some lower
>seeded teams in.  Some unexpected things do happen in the ECAC, even with
>home ice- Just look at Cornell final home weekend.
 
I think the only way the lower seeded teams are going to get in is if they
win the tourney.  Just pulling upsets in the q-finals is not going to be
good enough.  At any rate, I look at it the same way as when HE went from
best-of-three to single elimination and BC was knocked out: everybody
knows the format when you go in.  You need to prepare differently for
single elimination - you go in knowing you can't afford to lose a game.  If
you lose to an underdog, they earned it.
 
I prefer best-of-three because 1) I like more games :-), and 2) I think
the 0.7 goals/game advantage the home team has is not a big enough
advantage for all the work you've done in the regular season.  But at
least it is still an advantage.
 
Even if single elimination results in more underdogs winning, they won't
get in unless they win it all.  The problem I think you are alluding to
is if this happens & the ECAC is awarded only two bids that go to the
reg. season champ and the underdog tourney champ, leaving the 2nd place
team in the regular season home.  But if the 2nd place team is on the
fence at this point in comparison to other teams from other conferences,
then again it knows this and knows what it has to do.  If it can't win,
then it didn't earn its way in.
 
This is all coming back to the question of whether it is easier
for a visitor to win a single game or a two-game mini-game.  So, I
dug out the records for the ECAC tournament and took a look at what happened
in the quarterfinals.
 
1962-82: single elimination q-finals
Visitor won 18 of 84 series, or 21.4%.
3 visitors winning q-final won tournament.
 
1983-91: two-game/minigame q-finals
Visitor won 6 of 36 series, or 16.7%.
No visitor winning q-final won tournament.
No visitor winning q-final lost the first game (5-0-1).
[Following stats are 1983-89 since I don't have 90-91 here and can't
remember the specifics of each series.]
*Visitors winning the first game won 5 of 6 series.*
*No visitor losing the first game won the series (0-20).*
 
So going strictly by this, it does appear that chances of a visitor
winning a single elimination are better - but not by much.  Also, there
were more than twice as many single elimination series as two-game/minigame
series.  I don't think that the difference is that great.  I also think
there are other factors that come into play here that should be considered.
The ECAC was more balanced, at least as far as 1-8 go, prior to 1982
versus now.  All 8 teams usually finished over .500.  That doesn't
happen now.  It's more difficult for a 5-8 team to beat three good teams
and win the whole thing because of the disparity between the 1-4 teams and
the 5-8 teams on the whole.
 
It's debatable whether the home teams that lost the first game in
these series would have played better had it been single elimination,
but look at what happened when the visitor won the first game -
it usually won the series anyway.  And when it lost the first game, it
always lost the series. (1983-89)
 
BTW, from 1983-89 when the first game was a tie, the home team won 2 of
3 series.  Ties are difficult to consider since who knows what would
have happened had it been necessary to produce a winner.
 
Anyway, by this, it looks like single elimination will not produce very
different results from two-game/minigame over the long haul.
 
 
- mike (looking forward to the tons of messages this is sure to generate)