>Fom the New Haven Register (12/11/96)
>..........................................
>Talks upcoming on new hockey league
 
>By Dave Solomon
 
>Representatives from Quinnipiac, UConn, Fairfield and Sacred Heart are
>among a group of schools which will meet at the New Haven Coliseum
>later this month to discuss the formation of the nation's fifth
>Division I collegiate hockey league.
 
>As first reported in the Register Oct. 24, the meeting, which will be
>held Dec. 27 prior to the start of the two-day Quinnipiac Cup hockey
>tournament at the Coliseum, is also expected to include Army,
>Canisius, Holy Cross, Iona, Villanova and Niagara. The league will
>likely fall under the auspices of the ECAC.
 
        This is an interesting idea, but one obvious question is what
they'd call such a league.  The ECAC Lite? ;-)
 
> McDonald said an ultimate goal would be for the new league to receive
>an automatic bid to the 12-team NCAA tournament. Currently, the four
>existing leagues each receive two automatic bids.
 
        That seems like kind of a long-term goal.  Of that list, only
Army has been eligible for the NC$$s, and I don't think they've been
anywhere near even thinking about making it as an Independent.
 
        Actually, I checked last year's PWR ratings, and I found a
discrepancy win whether they're even a Team Under Consideration
(defined as a team with a winning record in Division I games).  Army's
record in all DI games last year was 11-8-1, over .500 and exactly the
minimum number of games (20) to be eligible for the NC$$s.  However,
six of their wins came against DI teams (Canisius, Holy Cross,
Fairfield (x2), Villanoca and Iona) which didn't meet the 20-game
limit.  So their record against "major" DI teams was only 5-8-1, which
was the record listed in the PWR rundown
<http://www.uscollegehockey.com/articles/PWH2H>.  But if the NC$$ is
counting games against "minor" DI teams towards the 20-game limit,
surely they must also count those games when calculating Pairwise
Comparisons.  (If not, consider the disaster that would ensue if Air
Force, following a slightly different schedule, played 19 games
against minor DI teams and got lucky and won their only other DI game
against, say, Colorado College.  That team would have a better record
than anyone in their last 20 games (if only "major" opponents counted)
and against teams under consideration, as well as common opponents
advantage over just about every WCHA team, and probably win all the
PWCs and be a top seed in the tournament.)  So counting all DI games,
Army's 11-8-1 record should have made them a TUC.  I don't think that
would change the rankings, since Army has a worse Ratings Percentage
Index (RPI) than any of the other 19 TUCs, and clearly loses all the
comparisons except to Providence, Colgate and Minnesota-Duluth.  Army
actually had better records than those three in their last 20 games,
and against Teams Under Consideration (thanks to their upset of
Cornell, which made them 1-2), but a worse RPI (and in the case of
Colgate a head-to-head loss); since RPI is the tiebreaker, each of
those comparisons will come down to common opponents.
 
        Anyway, it's something to think about for the PWR ratings when
they come out next month.  Can (and should) the code that produces
them be modified to include all DI games, and not just those among the
43 teams that play enough to qualify?
 
                                        John Whelan, Cornell '91
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        <http://www.cc.utah.edu/~jtw16960/jshock.html>
 
1996 Cornell Hockey: Ivy League Women's Champions
Ivy League Men's Champions/ECAC Men's Champions
 
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