The subject line wasn't long enough to put in "Proposed fix to the
way the NCAA selects College Hockey tournament teams"
This will be a long post, since it includes my idea for "normalizing"
college hockey and making the NCAA selection "fairer"
To start with, the best way to gauge the relative strengths of the
conferences is to play a non-trivial interconference schedule. This
could be along the lines of the NFL. To do that, it is easiest to first
balance the number of teams in each conference.
Since this idea couldn't be adopted for a while, I'm going to assume
12 teams in each conference; that gives time to "recruit" the 5 additiona
Div I teams (currently 10 WCHA, 12 CCHA [counting UAF], 8 HE, 12 ECAC, +
UM-Amherst).
Each team plays each conference opponent home-and-home (11x2=22 games),
four teams from each other conference (4x3=12 games), plus 2 games
decided by the schools (like the holiday tournaments), so the total is
36 games. That is something like what the WCHA and CCHA play currently.
The 4 opponents from each other conference would be determined by
conference rankings at the end of the prior year, just like the NFL does
today. So WCHA #1 would have the (for example) #1,#2,#3,#4 teams from
CCHA, HE and ECAC. I came up with a pairing that works (i.e. giving
the #1 team the toughest schedule on down to the #12 team the easiest).
Conference tournaments would invite only the top 8 teams and play would
be like the pre-1988 olympic style: two pools of four teams, one being
the #1,#4,#5,#8 the other #'s 2,3,6,7. Each team plays round-robin, and
two games are scheduled per day, nominally
Game1 Thurs 4:00 PM teams A and B
Game2 Thurs 7:00 PM teams C and D
Game3 Sat 1:00 PM teams A and C
Game4 Sat 4:00 PM teams B and D
Game5 Sun 4:00 PM teams A and D
Game6 Sun 7:00 PM teams B and C
If you wanted to keep the first round games at campus sites, you could
have games 1&2 at the ice of Seeds #3 and #4, then move the remaining
games to the camups sites of Seeds #1 and #2 (each in their respective
brackets). The lowest seed (i.e. #1 and #2) get to pick which first
round playoff schedule they want (A,B,C,D); the 2nd lowest seed gets to
pick from what's left, etc.
Then the top 2 teams from each bracket go to the Conference Champion-
ship at a "neutral" site. They play the other 2 teams they haven't yet
played and carry over the result of the team they have played. That makes
for 4 more games to be played, notionally:
Game1 Sat 1:00 PM teams A#1 and B#2
Game2 Sat 4:00 PM teams B#1 and A#2
Game3 Sun 4:00 PM teams A#2 and B#2
Game4 Sun 4:00 PM teams A#1 and B#1
with ties not allowed anywhere and tie-breaking on head-2-head followed
by goal differential. The last game in each bracket may need to go
beyond the "result" to determine the winner via goal differential. (So
even though Game4 or Game6 in the first round ended up with one team
winning [example 5-2], the teams may have to play "overtime" because one
of those two teams ends up tied in both h-2-h and g.d. with someone else.
Then, the NCAA automatic bids go to the conference champ and the tour-
nament champ with the selection committee getting sway over the remaining
4 plus 1 for each case where a conf champ wins the conf tourney. Then
the modified RPICH proposed earlier (.5R0 + .25R1 + .125R2 + .0625) is used
to at least narrow the field. Maybe let the ADs (or hockey reps) from the
4x4=16 teams not in the conference tournaments vote from among the candi-
date list, but not be able to vote for your own conference.
The biggest problem I came up with in this is the home-and-home for
teams in the WCHA, because travel is far more important there than it is
in the relatively compact ECAC and HE, and to a smaller extent CCHA
(though the CCHA currently uses that format for most of their games).
To solve this (WCHA problem), I'd propose using "travel pairs". That
is, two teams that visit other travel pairs and exchange games for the
weekend. Logical pairings using existing teams are UMD-MTU, CC-DU, UMn-
SCSU, UAA-UAF. That leaves UW and UND. If UIC were to come over from
the CCHA, then UW and UIC could pair up, leaving only UND. NMU would go
to the CCHA to pair up with LSSU (currently teams play the whole weekend
at LSSU instead of playing two opponents because of the travel to the
Soo, this pairs them up with NMU which is a viable travel day, weather
permitting (but then weather also could affect getting to the Soo in
the first place, or to Marquette for that matter!)).
The last travel pair in the WCHA would involve either getting a Div I
school close to UND (Bemidgi [sp?] State?) or adjusting the other pairs
depending on the other school.
Travel to and from Alaska could be done by charter jet, with 2 teams
paying the charter, vs one team.
While this isn't perfect, it comes closer than anything currently in
use.
Any constructive criticism? Should I submit it to the NCAA? :^)
Steve G
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