Before the season starts in earnes, and we have no time for such frivolities, I thought I'd describe a couple of ideas on which I've been ruminating for a while. They both involve changes to the current NC$$ tournament structure. One is fairly serious, the other a bit unrealistic. Both reflect my bias towards the importance of conference matchups and conference playoffs. First, the more serious one. I'd like to see two new selection criteria (to join the present list of Ratings Percentage Index, head-to-head, common opponents, last 20 and record vs. teams with winning records), to be used when the two teams being compared are in the same conference. One is regular season conference record, and the other conference playoff finish. So, for example in last year's ECAC, the ranking would be 1) Cornell (winner of conf tourney); 2) Harvard (loser of ECAC championship game; 3) Vermont (winner of consolation game); 4) Clarkson (loser of consolation game); 5-8) RPI, St. Lawrence, Brown and Colgate (losers of quarterfinal series); 9-10) Princeton and Dartmouth (losers of preliminary round games); 11-12) Union and Yale (didn't make the playoffs). Teams eliminated in the same round would be counted equally for this criterion--neither one would get the advantage. A few notes about the impact of these: a) In the case of upsets in the conference playoffs, adding the two criteria would cancel out. For example, Cornell wins one of the new criteria (playoff finish) over Vermont but Vermont wins the other one (regular season finish). b) The conference record is a bit redundant with the common opponents and head-to-head criteria, but there's no principle forbidding that. As was pointed out last year, RPI (the ratings method) gets used several times in the current system. Still, if there seems to be too much double jeopardy here, the different criteria could be weighted unequally, or conference record used *instead* of common opponents for members of the same conference. (As discussed below, conference record is more evenhanded than common opponents.) c) Common opponents tries to compare how the teams fared against the same competition, but doesn't take into consideration how often each team plays. As an extreme example, imagine that Lowell is being compared to DU for common opponents; suppose DU played Merrimack in the Denver Cup and Lowell faced Colorado College in the Burlington Coat Factory Challenge[;-)]. That means that those two games, along with DU's four conference games against CC and Lowell's three against Merrimack, are counted towards the common opponents. Now the criterion which is supposed to compare the overlap between the teams' schedules is weighing DU's four CC games and one Merrimack game against Lowell's one CC game and three Merrimack games. Hardly fair to DU, if CC and Merrimack have seasons similar to this past one. Comparing the conference records of teams in the same conference provides a balanced version of common opponents; both teams play all of the opponents the same number of times. (The WCHA is an exception, but the unbalanced schedule there also means that the final WCHA standings are not neccessarily fair either.) The more far-fetched idea is a re-structuring of the NC$$ tournament. The same twelve teams (the four conference [tournament] champions, four regular season champions the four to eight "best" other teams, as ranked by pairwise comparisons) would make the tourney, but there would be two tournaments to determine the Eastern and Western champions, each of which would be a double-elimination tournament in which everyone but the conference (tournament) champions started with one loss. In detail, this would mean: On the weekend after the conference tournaments, the four conference champions would host two games each. In the "ideal" scenario, where two teams advance from each conference, these would be the two "other" qualifying teams from the other conference in the same region, but if only two teams qualified from a conference, the extra slot would be filled with the "extra" team from the other conference. The higher seed of the two visitors would get to play on the second night (when the host team was more tired). So, in last year's tournament, that would mean Cornell (ECAC Champion) hosted Lowell (HE qualifier #2) one night and BU (HE Q1) the next; Providence (HE Champion) hosts Clarkson (ECAC Q2) followed by Vermont (ECAC Q1). Out west, Minnesota (WCHA champ) would host Western Michigan (CCHA Q2), then Lake State (CCHA Q1) while Michigan (CCHA champ) would host Michigan State (CCHA Q3) and Colorado College (WCHA Q1). Any team which won a game would advance. So if the host team swept, they'd be the only one from their bracket to go on, if they split, they and the team that beat them would go, and if they lost both games, the two visitors would advance. For example, suppose Cornell beats Lowell and loses to BU, Providence loses to Vermont and Clarkson, Michigan sweeps, and Minnesota beats WMU but loses to Lake State. Then Cornell, BU, Vermont and Clarkson advance in the East and Michigan, Minnesota and Lake State go on in the West. The following weekend, each region would hold a regional tournament at a neutral site to crown a regional champion. Depending on the events of the preceding weekend, the regional could feature two, three, or four teams. If there are two teams (i.e., both hosts swept the previous weekend), they play a best of three series. If there are three teams (one host sweeps and the other doesn't, as in the West in the above example), the undefeated team again takes on the other two on consecutive nights. If they sweep, they are the regional champion; if they do not, the winners of the first two games play on the third night to decide the championship. So for example, suppose Michigan beats Lake State, but loses to Minnesota. Then they play Minnesota again for the West championship. If there are four teams (as in the East above), they play a standard four-team single-elimination tournament that weekend to determine the regional champion. Of course, teams are paired to avoid rematches and conference matchups. On the third weekend, the east and west champions face off on a neutral site to determine a national champion. This could be either a single game or a best-of-three. (I think it's better not to count the regional champions' losses in the regionals against them.) Not that I expect the NC$$ to do anything like this, but I think this has a lot of nice features. By going to three weeks, it avoids the conflict with basketball without adding a week off. A team can't be knocked out of the competition by a single upset (in effect, the non-conference-champions have the loss that knocked them out of their conference playoffs counted against them). This scheme would combine the campus sites and neutral sites of prior tourneys. Teams would no longer be sent out of their regions, which the NC$$ has in the past based on things other than performance on the ice. In fact, the whole system would have cut-and-dried rules, eliminating the judgement calls made by the selection committee. Regionals would involve local teams, boosting attendence, while still pitting teams from different conferences. Little bits of tinkering can still be done, such as declaring that teams in the same conference be seeded according to regular season finish rather than pairwise comparisons. Also, there's some question as to the best arrangement of the two or three games of the two regionals; two or three teams would have to play one game a night for two or three nights, while a four-team tournament would be more fair with two games one night and one the second. And of course, there are down sides. Only two teams in the finals could bring down attendence. Fans of east-west matchups would be dissapointed on the whole (heck, even major league baseball has added inter-league play). But like I said, I think it's cute. And I'd say it's more reasonable than other alternative schemes which have been put forth. [Like the scheme where the RPI Engineers get the top seed every year. ;-)] John Whelan, Cornell '91 <[log in to unmask]> <http://www.as.ucsb.edu/kcsb/tmss/jphock.html> 1996 Cornell Hockey: Ivy League Women's Champions Ivy League Men's Champions/ECAC Men's Champions HOCKEY-L is for discussion of college ice hockey; send information to [log in to unmask], The College Hockey Information List.