The academic index is used to make sure hockey players fall within a certain class of people who are admitted to the school. Some ridiculous formula is used that combines GPA, SAT scores, and whatever else to decide what the average of the freshman class is, and then hockey players must fall within a certain percentage of that. Unfortunately these are about the last schools in America to rate people based on raw numbers and also to put such a high weight on the SAT. Not to mention that people who may not have as high GPAs or SAT scores won't necessarily do awful in college; in fact, the reverse is often true, especially if someone is going to go through the trouble of trying to get into one of the great schools in the ECAC. Or that a student or hockey player may have come from a high school where many students were particularly bright, so a player who may have been in the top 50% of his class might have been in the top 25% elsewhere - but all the index will look at is what rank you were in your graduating class. There are so many holes in the index, it's outrageous. WMPL is in Michigan. WMEB is in Orono. I really don't know how the locations have any bearing, I thought the voters were supposedly geographically distributed about equally - but I don't know for sure. - mike