If a MAAC team finished in the top 12 according to the selection committee's
criteria (excluding the MAAC escape clause from the criteria), won the MAAC
regular season title, and won the MAAC post-season tournament, would you
advise the selection committee to include that team?
 
I would.
 
And this recommendation on my part would be based on what you see in the
NCAA basketball tournament: the great games are when schools from lower tier
conferences give teams from higher tier conferences everything that they can
handle.
 
The MAAC will probably not stay in a distinctive lower tier category for a
long period of time (as one would see in basketball), but I am still a
proponent of the MAAC breaking glass ceilings sooner rather than later.
 
In addition, I am a proponent of scaling the # of auto bids to each
conference back to one (the tournament champion) and letting the selection
criteria handle the rest.
 
The fact that each conference gets two births instead of one makes it that
much harder for the MAAC to get at least one team into the tournament.
 
Jason
 
---John Whelan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> I think Charlie's analysis points to why the committees' MAAC Escape
> Clause will be used to exclude Quinnipiac this season.  Some aspects
> of it are specific to the MAAC's inbred schedule (lack of head-to-head
> games, and common opponets, which used to be worse before this
> weekend, when Q's only non-conference game was a win over Army and
> thus *no*one* from a major conference could do better than tie them on
> common opponents), but some of it is food for thought about how the
> committee might modify the selection criteria to make them more fair.
>
> Craig Powers has commented on his unofficial NU Hockey Page
> <http://lynx.dac.neu.edu/c/cpowers/nuhockey/> that the use of straight
> winning percentage in the "last 16" criteria unfairly benefitted teams
> with weak schedules.  The Q case is an extreme version of this; maybe
> the committee should look into building strength of schedule into this
> criterion as well.
>
> Also, someone commented on the Cornell Hockey Chat last night that
> pairwise comparisons can be greatly effected by whether borderline
> teams end up above or below .500, swinging the records vs TUC of
> higher-ranked teams.  As we see, Q gets credit for games vs TUC which
> are only against such borderline teams.  Perhaps some sort of
> weighting of the TUC record by RPI or winning percentage of the
> opponents would avoid both misleading TUC records and discontinuous
> changes.
        _______   ______
       |__   __| |  __  |  Jason Patton        http://www.gojp.com/jp/
 ____     | |    | |__| |      Following College Hockey Since 1991
|____|    | |    |  ____|  Boston U. 1991-1995     Princeton 1995-1998
        __| |    | |       1995 NCAA Champions     1998 ECAC Champions
       |____|    |_|        MAAC Hockey League Inaugural Season 1998-
 
MAAC Game of the Week: http://www.broadcast.com/sports/ncaa/maac/hockey/
 
 
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