On Sun, 28 Jun 1998, John T. Whelan wrote:
 
> J. Michael Neal writes
>
> >There is a much
> >smaller set of teams in football that have finished ranked among the top four teams
> >than there are different teams that have made it to the basketball Final Four.
>         Not to mention the difference between being voted in the top
> four in a subjective poll based on your regular season performance and
> advancing in a postseason tournament.  It's got to be easier to
> qualify for the field of 64 and string together four upsets than to go
> 11-0 (which is what a MAC team would have to do to make the top four
> in a football poll).
 
I am willing to bet that even a 12-0 MAC team would have a hard time
making the top four in a football poll. The same is true of the Big West,
and maybe C-USA.
 
>         ObHockey: I would add something here, but I forgot what we
> were talking about.  Are we worried that the flood of new schools to
> D1 will lead to a family of weak sisters, or that the Big Ten will
> form, gobble up money, and gut the Western conferences?
 
I think we have managed to take every concern about D-I growth and roll
them into one humongous thread. :-)
 
The question of a consistent D-I quality is interesting. I think that as
the number of teams increases, the gap between top and bottom will rise.
My experience has been that an increase in the number of leagues leads to
less consistency. I'm thinking of Canadian hockey in this case. Major
Junior has three leagues, and they are relatively evenly matched. Junior
A has 11 leagues, and there is a bigger gap in quality between the good
leagues (BC & Alberta) and the not-so-good (Northern Ontario). Junior B
leagues are more numerous, and range in quality from the southwestern
Ontario leagues, who are essentially Jr. A level to the league in my
hometown, which is a goonshow and rarely does anything in inter-league
playoffs.
 
Getting back to D-I growth, while we are seeing growth in Division I, it
is not really growth in hockey overall. The growth is coming almost
entirely as a result of an exodus from Division II. IIRC, UNO and Niagara
are the only truly new hockey programs to come on the scene.
 
I don't think a dilution in talent is a big concern right now. As long as
hockey is growing at the grassroots level in the US, there should be
enough new players to fill the available spaces. I think we will see more
sure-fire NHLers going to the CHL from the US, but I don't necessarily
think that is a bad thing. The worth of a level of hockey isn't, in my
mind, determined by the number of NHLers it produces.
 
> Attention ECAC:   Eight is Enough--Flush the Final Five!
 
Hear, hear!
 
See you later,
John
 
--
John Edwards - Carleton (Ont) '96, Manitoba '00 - [log in to unmask]
                          My home life is unsatisfying.
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