Chris Schierer writes:
 
>         As an RPI fan fondly remembering the upset of #10 RPI over #1 Harvard
> in the 91-92 season, I came up with a question for you statistics fanatics...
>
> Have the top four teams in a conference ever failed to make the semifinals at
> the same time?  (in other words have there ever been 4 upsets in the quarters?
 
It's never happened in the ECAC, and as far as I know, it hasn't happened in
any of the other conferences either (but I would have to look that one up).
 
The closest the ECAC ever came to having all four top teams upset in the quar-
terfinals was "Black Tuesday" in 1978, when three of them bought it.  The
pairings were:
 
     [8] New Hampshire at [1] Boston University
     [7] Providence at [2] Cornell
     [6] Brown at [3] Clarkson
     [5] Boston College at [4] RPI
 
The only top seed to advance was BU, and they had to go into overtime to get by
New Hampshire, 6-5.  Providence won 8-5, Brown won 6-2, and BC beat RPI 7-6 in
OT.  Providence then defeated BU (for the second time that season -- those were
BU's only two losses all year, and the Terriers would go on to take the NC$$
championship), and BC got by Brown to set up an ECAC championship game between
teams that did not have home ice for the quarterfinals -- one of the two times
that's happened in the ECAC.  (the other was last year, when RPI and Princeton
turned the trick)  BC won the title game.
 
The caveat in all this, of course, is that back then, the ECAC had 17 teams in
it.  All the teams from the '78 playoffs had league records above 0.500, so the
upsets were not as significant as they would be if something similar happened
now.
 
 
Bill Fenwick
 
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