There has been much talk recently about who is to blame for RPI's recent loss to Princeton. As I wasn't there, my opinion is certainly worthless. It seems to me that one cannot this early in the season even conclude whether or not this was an upset as not enough games have been played, although certainly the 9-1 score does not correpond to the relative talent level of the two teams. A number of people have commented that in one-sport schools undue pressure is put on the team in question by the fans and the local media. RPI fits the description of a one-sport school (or at least one that the students care about). This was the situation when I was there (1964-74) and still appears to be the case now. I think, as has been commented upon before, that this pressure gives rise to both upset wins and upset loses (and I am not stating that Princeton was one of these). It has been stated that the Siena basketball team actually gets more press than the RPI Hockey team, but clearly there is enough ink for both. I guess that a good question would be what could be done to keep this pressure from occurring. I don't have an answer. I personally think that it is a good thing for a small school to have one sport that is big-time. What else is there to do in Troy on winter weekends besides studying and going to Hockey games? Not much, when I was there. From my experience there was very little school spirit at RPI besides for watching the Hockey team. I have seen no evidence on Hockey-L that this has changed in the least. (Actually, the only change that I have noted is that the male-female ratio has changed to 4-1. My Freshman class had about 25 females in a class of slightly over 1000, and this was the most females in history at the time, indeed supposedly more than in the other three classes there at the time in total.) It has been commented that RPI is still feeling the effect of winning the national championship in 1985 -- do it once and they expect it every year. I have a bit of a hard time believing this. It is now nine years since 1985. When I arrived in 1964, it was ten years since the 1954 championship -- almost the same -- and I don't recall much talk of that. Of course, then none of the players from 1954 were still playing hockey at least at the pro level, while several players from 1985 are in the NHL and the minor leagues making it a bit harder to forget the championship now. I had not thought about it this way previously, but this year is in a couple of ways similar to my Freshman year. In both cases, the team was coming off of an NCAA appearance and had a new coach. In 1964-5, the team lost its best player from the year before, Bob Brinkworth, and struggled to a .500 record suffering from the usual lack of depth. I don't think that the analogy can be carried much further as the school in 1964 was quite happy with the performance in the tournament while apparently that is not the case now. (I am not stating that I think that RPI should have beaten UNH last spring, only that that was the prevalent opinion put forth at the time.) In 1964, RPI was seated 6th in the ECAC and ended up third in the tourney. When SLU decided not to attend the NCAA tourney (does anyone know why?), RPI went in its place and again finished third. Little has been stated about what occurs at other schools that are also one-sport schools. There has been some comment about Bowling Green, but the situation, although perhaps similar, is not exactly the same there because BGSU is a Div-I school. (I do hear about their football and basketball teams on the news, never about RPI's.) What is it like at Clarkson, LSSU, MTU, etc? Do people think that Clarkson's early season performance over the last few years is due to the same phenomenon? Ralph Baer RPI (I can't say Rensselaer) '68, '70, '74 By the way, in 1968-69, an 0-9 Princeton team beat a nationally-ranked RPI team that had earlier that year beaten Cornell with Ken Dryden.