First off, I'd like to say that comparing D1 hockey to D1 hoops is silly.
As Jack Parker has said many times, "the NCAA is run by football and
basketball people for football and basketball people. To them, we're just
like volleyball."
 
However, since we are going to compare sports...
 
This was a BIG debate in NCAA soccer a bunch of years ago. There were a lot
of smaller schools fielding quality teams but were unable to get access to
the tournament. In many cases the soccer was the only D1 sport; the rest of
the school sports were D2 or D3.
 
Nonetheless, because of the conference associations many of these teams
were not allowed in to the tournament, citing the same reasons -- "they
haven't proven themselves."
 
Isn't the tournament a chance to prove themselves?
 
Which is exactly what happened with soccer. Schools like Lehigh, Fordham,
Butler, Lynn, Wingate (and many, many others) not only stood up to teams
like Virginia, Indiana, UCLA and North Carolina... but began to beat them
as well.
 
The same thing has happened with women's college soccer.
 
BTW, both tournaments include 48 teams, so please don't send flames about
how nobody cares about soccer.
 
 
In that vein, it seems to me that MAAC teams should be allowed into the
postseason tournament. I'm not saying award an automatic bid, rather award
a bid if they meet the at-large criteria, similar to the way it's done for
basketball, soccer, volleyball, and baseball. Heck, go ahead and make them
the #12 team; they at least deserve the chance.
 
As for the following comment:
 
At 04:08 PM 2/15/99 -0500, Dick wrote:
> They [MAAC] should prove themselves against the
>established hockey conferences in the same way that the Ivy League,  the
>Patriot League,  and the NEC basketball conferences have proved themselves
>against the Big East,  the ACC,  and the Big 10.   Which is to say ... they
>haven't.   Not even close.   And yet they still get auto bids.   And every
 
Both Penn and Princeton -- Ivy League teams -- have done quite well to
establish themselves over the years. In fact, one or both are often ranked
in the top 25 (don't know about this year). About 10 years ago people said
the same things about the WAC; then along came UNLV and now Utah and New
Mexico.
 
Perhaps a more direct comparison is better here:
 
UConn plays in the MAAC; if allowed into the tournament because of a strong
enough record, they could conceivably play a team like BU in the first
round of the East regional. They'd be huge underdogs, but they'd be playing.
 
Kind of like 1990 when BU was a huge underdog against UConn in the first
round of the East regional basketball tournament.
 
 
greenie
 
HOCKEY-L is for discussion of college ice hockey;  send information to
[log in to unmask], The College Hockey Information List.