Terry Long writes > It is unlikely that those "3 or 4 other teams" John mentions could have > beaten New Hampshire and also made a respectable showing against North > Dakota. So, it looks like there must not have been any "flaws in the > selection criteria" as John asserts with the selection of NIagara. Since J. Micheal Neal has already admirably pointed out the weakness in this argument, I won't bother to recount the respectable performances of the teams in question against UNH and NoDak over the course of the season (or Providence's win over UNH in the Hockey East regular season), but just point out that if this sort of anecdotal reasoning were valid, one could just as easily state that Wisconsin didn't deserve their #1 seed as a result of their loss to BC despite an extra day's rest. Does this mean that a system which would seed Wisconsin below BC based on this season's results "must not" have any flaws? There is a valid point hiding under all that rhetoric, which is a reason why I was not surprised Niagara pulled off the upset. The Purple Eagles have overachieved this season, pulling off wins like BU, CC and RPI that are at odds with other data such as their losses to Canisius and Western Michigan and their tie to Brown. Perhaps this makes them a better candidate for the tournament than a rating based on their overall performance would indicate. However, the NCAA's criteria are also intended to favor "big game teams" by considering performance against teams with non-losing records as a separate criterion. Niagara performs well in those games (and would do even better if Canisius and Quinnipiac were not considered TUCs); their KRACH rating based only on those games would be 67% higher than that based on their entire schedule. This means for instance that they would also win the comparison over Rensselaer if the effects of strength of schedule were factored in, despite having a worse overal KRACH rating, on the strength of their performance against TUCs (big game) and in the last 16 games (the NCAA also favors hot teams). But Mankato's performance against winning teams was still better when the strengths of those teams are taken in to consideration, and Minnesota, Providence and Colorado College would all win enough other criteria to take their respective comparisons despite being weaker against TUCs. Again, this is all assuming a particular method of accounting for strength of schedule which appears at http://www.slack.net/~whelan/cgi-bin/tbrw.cgi?rankings > Also, it should be noted that Mankato was unable to beat UAH this year > (1-0-1 at Mankato). It should be further noted that games against Alambama-Huntsville DID NOT COUNT towards selection this season. John Whelan, Cornell '91 [log in to unmask] http://www.amurgsval.org/joe/ HOCKEY-L is for discussion of college ice hockey; send information to [log in to unmask], The College Hockey Information List.