I am not sure, but there seems to possibly be some confusion taking place here. What I am referring to is not a poll that says that the 4th team from one conference is better than the 2nd (or 1st) team from another, but the *actual statistics* used by the selection committee. The poll does not determine the seeds/bids, the numbers do. I think I have seen a few people refer to the polls deciding the seeds and this just isn't true. This was determined to be a way to compare teams across conferences even though they may never play. It doesn't care about what conference a team is in, or how many games it plays, or how many nonleague games it plays. If it is supposed to be so difficult to compare teams across conferences that it would make more sense to require taking two from each conference, then I say 1) why not just take 3 from each conference (of course I don't agree with this), and 2) still, how are you going to seed them if you don't think there is a good way to compare the teams? Finally, another point that hasn't been brought up: the WCHA, CCHA & HE all do not have the collection of teams at the bottom of their standings with poor overall records that the ECAC does, and even in the nonleague games that are played, the ECAC is far behind the other three. There truly are real factors at work here. - mike